


Of Psychics and Magic in the Modern Day

by cheyflowers



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Background Relationships, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Lots of Magic Everywhere, Lots of Snarky Psychics, M/M, Magical Realism, Minor Choi Seungcheol | S.Coups/Lee Jihoon | Woozi, Minor Jeon Wonwoo/Kim Mingyu, Minor Kim Mingyu/Xu Ming Hao | The8, Past Character Death, Supernatural Elements, Unhealthy Relationships, With EVERYTHING, Xu Minghao is So Done, minor depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 56,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14772569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheyflowers/pseuds/cheyflowers
Summary: Minghao knew his life wasn't exactly what you would call ordinary.  Between his six psychic roommates, his sort-of-dead best friend, and his own habit of talking to plants (and having them talk back), things were a bit strange.  But it was his own normal, and he was used to it.That is, until the day that Wen Junhui killed him.  Sort of.When that happened, it all got very complicated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've ever posted, and honestly I probably shouldn't be given that I don't work on it often enough to promise regular updates. But I'm a bit out of practice with writing, so I'm hoping that posting will actually encourage me to keep working at it. 
> 
> This fic is very loosely based off of The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater. By that, I mean that the location and a couple of character types (a house full of psychics, sort-of dead people, and some others) are similar, but the plot and everything else is completely different. Perhaps it could take place in The Raven Cycle universe, except I don't think that universe ever included actual ghosts, witches, warlocks, or any other supernatural beings other than demons. 
> 
> One other note, this fic is Junhao (as well as some background ships), but I feel that it would be dishonest to pretend that it is extremely ship-driven, when the plot and general Ot17 interactions are probably a heavier feature. But the ships are there~
> 
> Okay, that's a lot, so sorry. Enjoy~

Minghao was not psychic.  That point should be made clear right away.  If you were to ask him about what the future holds, he would most likely shrug and say “Not a fucking clue, man,” then direct you to someone more likely to give you a useful answer.  Xu Minghao was not psychic in any way, shape or form.

Even though it seemed that most everyone else in his life was.

“Oh _Haaaaaoo_ , darling!”

Minghao groaned quietly to himself, hand still outstretched towards the front door handle, that sweet promise of freedom…so close, and yet so far away when you lived with the people he did.  Rarely did he get out of the Maze in the morning without one of its many inhabitants stopping him for something.  In this case, the culprit was instantly recognizable.  No one else called him ‘darling’, or used that sickly-sweet tone of voice with just enough of an edge to be dangerous. 

Allowing himself a quiet sigh of defeat, Minghao turned back around.  “What do you want?”

Enter: Yoon Jeonghan.  Psychic.  Specialty, being a mix of a Suburban Mom and a Vegas Con Artist.

Jeonghan was descending from the staircase directly up against the front door.  Yes, it was a weird place for a staircase.  No, none of them knew why it was there.  In Minghao’s opinion, it seemed to be there mostly for Jeonghan to descend from dramatically at opportune moments.  That very moment seemed to be an opportune one, for Jeonghan did appear very dramatic as he stepped down onto the landing.  Almost unfairly so, given that it was about eight-thirty in the morning, but then again Jeonghan always looked unfairly dramatic and beautiful no matter the time. 

“Darling, you don’t need to rush out so fast,” Jeonghan tittered as he stopped in front of Minghao, brushing silky black hair away from his eyes.  “Seungkwan wants to know if you talked to Mini Kwan this morning.  He’s worried that she hasn’t been getting enough water.”

Minghao stared blankly back at him.  “Are you kidding me?  First off, how many times do I have to tell him its name is _not_ Mini Kwan, it’s…”

He was interrupted by Jeonghan’s hand waving dismissively in his face.  “Yes I _know_ , Hao, but none of us can pronounce it, and you’re not going to be able to stop Seungkwan anyways.  Can you just go talk to her?”

“Fine.  Not like I had to get to class or anything,” Minghao muttered under his breath as he turned back around once more, and instead of reaching for the front door moved a bit to the left and all but stalked into the kitchen, Jeonghan trailing after him. 

The bonsai sitting on the kitchen counter did, in fact, look a bit underwatered.  Its name also was _not_ , for the record, Mini Kwan, but Minghao had trouble translating its real name into any sort of spoken language, so Seungkwan had taken that as permission to rename it as he saw fit. 

“Oh, and tell him to stop calling it ‘she’, too,” Minghao added as he leaned towards the tiny plant.  “I can’t keep trying to explain the concept of gender when they ask… _Hey, how are you?_ ” he added, but the latter part sounded less like any sort of language and more like the sound of wind blowing through a forest on a warm summer day.  A breath, a gust, the rustling of leaves, a bird chirping in the distance, silence.

The bonsai twitched to life on the counter, its tiny branches shaking slightly as it rustled in response.  Minghao listened carefully, nodding a few times, then turned to look at Jeonghan, who was watching the exchange as if it were perfectly normal.  Which, for the Maze, it was.  “Tell Seungkwan to stop asking Seokmin to water it.  He never remembers.” 

“Ha!  I _knew_ he was lying!” a new voice floated into the kitchen, just barely preceding its owner, who stomped more so than floated.

Enter: Boo Seungkwan.  Sixteen.  Psychic.  Specialty: Being Dramatique™. 

Also very capable of running his mouth at speeds that would make an Olympic sprinter jealous, as he was demonstrating at that moment.  “I cannot _believe_ him, all I wanted was for someone to take care of poor Mini Kwan while I was at vocal lessons on Tuesdays, it’s literally _once_ a week, but does he remember?  _Nooo_ , and then when I ask him he goes, ‘ _Oh yeah, I took care of it!’_   As _if_.  He is so gonna get it later.  Draw a card.”  The last sentence was directed towards Minghao, who blinked.  Seeing Seungkwan angry was always a bit disconcerting, given that he bore a strong physical resemblance to a teenaged cherub.

“Huh?”

Seungkwan _tsk_ ’ed loudly, shaking the spread deck in Minghao’s direction.  “Anyone read you yet today?  No?  Draw a card…please,” he tacked on, apparently as an afterthought, glancing over at Jeonghan hovering nearby.  Deciding that it would probably be in his best interest not to piss off Seungkwan any more than he already was, Minghao reached out and pulled a card from the center of the tarot deck.

“Well?” Seungkwan pressed, apparently unable to wait for a second longer than necessary.  “What is it?”              

“De- No, it’s the Fool.  For a second I thought it was Death, for some reason,” Minghao shrugged. 

“Hmm.”  The younger boy snatched the card back.  “Well then, look out for any new beginnings, I suppose.”

“Speaking of new beginnings,” Jeonghan interrupted, glancing up at the two of them from where he seemed to be making himself breakfast.  “Minghao, you haven’t been summoning any spirits lately, have you?”

Minghao stared.  “No.”

“It’s just a question,” Jeonghan sighed, as if Minghao’s disbelief was utterly uncalled for and incomprehensible.  “Your friend hasn’t been around either, has he?  Around the Maze, I mean.”

“You know Soonyoung doesn’t come into the Maze.”     

“I just thought I’d ask.”  Jeonghan shut the fridge with an air of finality.  “There’s been something a bit dead in the air lately, it does no harm to check in.”

“ _I_ haven’t smelt anything dead,” Seungkwan retorted from where he was poking at Mini Kwan’s leaves. 

Minghao restrained himself from rolling his eyes – the last thing he needed was yet another scolding from Jeonghan about his attitude.  He already got them about twice daily.  “Look, it’s probably just Seungcheol not having cleaned his room in weeks again.  Or maybe Jihoon finally snapped and killed him, and now his corpse is stuffed into our air vents and slowly rotting down to the bones.”

Seungkwan wrinkled his nose primly.  “Ew.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for class, so I’ll see you guys later.”  With that, Minghao all but bolted out of the kitchen, before either of them could bother him with something else ridiculous.

All in all, a rather average morning.

 

* * *

 

 

He made it about thirty feet from the Maze before Soonyoung appeared next to him.  It was always like that – he never saw Soonyoung walking up to him, or waiting for him up ahead.  Just one second there wasn’t Soonyoung, and the next there was. 

The fact that Soonyoung was dead probably had something to do with that.

“’Sup, Ming- _ho_!”  Soonyoung burst out into a loud cackle halfway through his own joke, even going so far as to slap his knee like an old man in a rocking chair.  “Oh my god, I’ve been waiting to use that one since yesterday.”

“Hilarious,” Minghao deadpanned as his friend fell into step with him.  The strip of grass next to the winding road towards Minghao’s college was not quite wide enough for them to walk side by side.  At times it narrowed to nothing and left them on the actual road, so Minghao always let Soonyoung walk on the inside.  Not like anything would happen if a car hit _him_.  At least, he didn’t think so. 

“You’re coming to dance practice today, right?” he asked, glancing up at the other boy.  He wasn’t sure what Soonyoung would be doing otherwise – come to think of it, he really didn’t have much of an idea what Soonyoung did any time he wasn’t with Minghao – but the boy had missed the last couple of practices, so it was worth checking.

As it was, Soonyoung nodded happily.  “Yup!  We’re still working on that one group piece, right? The one that goes…”  And of course, because he was Soonyoung, he started dancing along in the middle of the road, arms flailing and almost hitting Minghao in the face.

“Watch it!” he yelped.  As if on cue, a car came barreling around the corner, and Minghao jumped back off the road, dragging Soonyoung automatically with him as the car just barely screamed past the two of them, horn blaring loudly.  The trees on the side of the road chattered excitedly at the near miss, and Minghao flipped the car off as it sped away, just on principle. 

 _Language!_ an elderly birch snapped at him.  Minghao flipped it off too, ignoring the forest’s scandalized gasps. 

“Yes, we’re still working on that one.  We didn’t add on that much last week, though.  And if you almost hit me again, I’ll let the car get you next time.”

Soonyoung pouted.  “You’re a terrible friend.”

“I’m your only friend.”

“Yeah, but _I’m_ dead, what’s your excuse?”

Minghao rolled his eyes as they turned the corner, the gates of his University looming up ahead.  “I was a foreigner who lived with the local psychic nutcases during high school, so I was automatically a complete social outcast, and didn’t bother changing anything for college.”

Soonyoung stared at him in silence for a few seconds – a true accomplishment, in Minghao’s books.  “I was being facetious, but that was actually kind of a sad answer.”

“Fuck off,” Minghao replied automatically, but he could feel his lips pulling up into a grin at the familiar, easy banter.  Maybe it did say something about his complete lack of a social life that his only friend outside of the Maze was a dead boy, but he liked to think that he and Soonyoung would have been friends even if the other was alive. 

He still wasn’t quite sure how the whole dead thing worked, anyway.  Make no mistake, Soonyoung was definitely dead.  For one thing, he’d assured Minghao of the fact himself, back when they’d first met over four years ago, while Minghao was still in high school.  Minghao figured you could usually trust people to know whether they were dead or not, and Soonyoung seemed pretty sure of it.  For another, Minghao had done a bit of internet snooping and found an obituary.

Kwon Soonyoung, dead at age twenty-two.  It was dated over ten years ago. 

Minghao had never mentioned the obituary to Soonyoung.  He had a feeling from the way that Soonyoung never mentioned his life before dying that he probably didn’t have any strong memories of being alive. 

So the question remained, what was Soonyoung doing being…well, not _quite_ as dead as the average dearly departed?  He wasn’t a ghost, that much Minghao was sure of.  He’d met a ghost before – an absolutely terrifying specter who’d followed Chan home from kindergarten one day, and had refused to leave the Maze until Jihoon finally called in his older brother, who happened to be a skilled exorcist.  But that was only after several days of the ghost constantly floating through walls in the Maze and popping out of floors to scream in people’s faces, translucent figure dripping with blood and ectoplasm. 

Minghao had once asked Soonyoung if he could walk through walls.  Soonyoung had promptly run full speed at the nearest wall and managed to knock himself out for a solid five minutes. 

For all intents and purposes, Soonyoung _seemed_ alive.  He looked alive – no translucence or ectoplasm anywhere.  He walked, or ran, or danced his way around instead of floating.  People could see him and treated him as if he were any other normal person.  In fact, Minghao was pretty sure the only people who actually knew that Soonyoung was dead were himself and his housemates, who he’d told many years ago. 

“Yo, wake up sleepyhead!”  Minghao startled slightly, pulled out of his thoughts by Soonyoung’s loud voice.  “We’re here,” his friend pointed out, gesturing towards the building in front of them.  “You’ve got dirt class first, right?”

“Soil science,” Minghao corrected automatically, hitching his bag up a bit higher on his shoulders.  Around them, the college campus was slowly getting into the start of its day, bleary-eyed students trudging into academic buildings and clutching cups of coffee like a lifeline. 

“Yeah, like I said, dirt class.” 

Minghao shrugged.  “Hey, it’s part of being a plant science major.” 

Snorting, Soonyoung took a step back with a teasing grin.  “Yeah, and so’s organic chemistry lab.  Have fun with _that_ later.”  And then before Minghao could reply, he was gone, the universe immediately rearranging itself so that there was no Soonyoung at all, as if there hadn’t ever been one.  The students around Minghao continued their sleepy trek, none of them apparently having noticed that a person had straight-up vanished into thin air in their midst. 

Minghao sighed and turned to join them, doing his best to ignore the shiver of foreboding that went through him at the thought of organic chemistry lab.  Even dirt class was better than _that_.

 

* * *

 

 

Minghao’s lab section was at two in the afternoon and lasted for three hours. 

Of course, the three hours was supposedly hypothetical, at least according to Minghao’s TA – a soft-smiled, pretty boy grad student whose name Minghao couldn’t remember for the life of him, even though he felt slightly guilty about it.  “As long as you guys complete your pre-lab assignments before class and follow all directions carefully,” the TA had said on the first day of class, “You should have no problem finishing well within the allotted time.”

So far, Minghao had ended up staying for the entire three hours every lab period. 

His assigned lab partner probably had something to do with that. 

“Minghao!”  Said lab partner burst into the lab the way he always did: in a flurry of too-long limbs that just barely missed knocking a beaker off the desk, completely oblivious to the looks that the majority of their classmates shot at him, an equal number annoyed and endeared. 

Enter: Kim Mingyu.  185 cm of good intentions and terrible coordination.  The face of a male model and the attention span of a gnat.  And – for better or for worse, Minghao still wasn’t too sure how he felt about the situation – Minghao’s lab partner.

Mingyu was currently gesturing wildly as he babbled, nearly smashing yet another piece of unfortunate glassware.  Minghao was really getting tired of having to go to the stock room for replacements.  “I’m so sorry I’m late, I was taking a nap but my alarm didn’t go off, and then I thought I’d lost my textbook - ”

“It’s fine, Mingyu,” Minghao sighed, automatically moving the test tube rack a bit further back to keep it safely under the reaction hood as Mingyu’s fingers just barely missed it once again.

“Oh, good.”  The taller boy let out a sigh of relief, dropping his backpack.  “What are we doing today?”

“Just a standard reflux.”  Minghao watched out of the corner of his eye as Mingyu pulled on his lab coat and goggles.  Completely unfair that they made him look like an extra on a laboratory drama, while they made Minghao look like a kid playing dress-up on career day.  “As long as you did the pre-lab work and wrote down the procedure, it should be fine.”

Mingyu’s face froze in an expression that was almost scarily reminiscent of a puppy that was just realizing it had fucked up big time, wagging tail slowly lowering between its legs.  “Um…”

Minghao closed his eyes, doing his best to ward off the headache that was threatening to bloom at any moment.  “Here,” he growled, unable to keep the slight annoyance out of his voice even as he pushed his own open notebook towards his partner.  “You can copy mine before the TA notices.”  _Why do I even put up with this?_

Mingyu smiled at him then, wide and guileless and Minghao’s heart most certainly did _not_ stutter in his chest. 

 _Right.  That’s why_. 

“Thanks, Minghao, you’re the best!”  Pulling the notebook towards him, the look that Mingyu had on his face now was as if Minghao had saved his life, as opposed to just his lab grade.  “Seriously, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Yeah.  Yeah, no problem.”  His voice sounded slightly breathless even to his own ears, and Minghao felt his face flush with embarrassment as he silently thanked every known deity that Mingyu was so damn oblivious.

It didn’t seem that everyone else in the world was, though, as there was a snort from somewhere behind Minghao.  Whipping his head around, he glared in the direction that then noise had come from.  Unfortunately, the likely culprit – the guy who worked at the station next to them, who Minghao was pretty sure was also Chinese based on the fact that he’d heard him cursing in Mandarin before – had his back to them, so all Minghao could do was shoot metaphorical daggers at the back of his head. 

“Hey, Minghao?  Which one’s the condenser again?”

It was going to be a long three hours.

 

* * *

 

 

There was something almost disgustingly satisfying about stretching, Minghao thought, feeling his body groan in protest as he spread his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the hardwood floor of the studio.  On the one hand, it hurt like hell, but the sensation of muscles and tendons slowly loosening was worth it. 

He felt hands on his back, pushing him further down, and Minghao hissed automatically in response.  “Oh come on, you can do better than that,” Soonyoung said, and then suddenly Soonyoung had been there the whole time, kneeling behind him and putting weight onto his back to deepen the stretch.  

Minghao opened his mouth to shoot back a witty reply, but all that came out was a whine of protest as Soonyoung increased the pressure.  “Ack.” 

“Eloquent.”  Soonyoung let him back up slowly, then moved around to plop on the floor in front of Minghao and proceeded to completely fold himself in half, hands easily reaching past his toes.  Apparently sort-of dead bodies didn’t give a shit about the rules of anatomy, and even after skipping the last two weeks of club Soonyoung was just as flexible as ever.

Completely unfair. 

A new pair of feet bounced their way into Minghao’s field of vision, accompanied by a loud “Heyyy you two!”  He glanced up to see Hoseok, one of the club presidents, beaming down at him and Soonyoung with a trademark heart-shaped smile.  “We’re gonna start soon, and Jeonghwa’s looking to get into the new choreo as soon as possible, so I’m just checking that everyone remembers what we did last week.  All good?”

Minghao nodded, eyeing Soonyoung warily, but the other boy just grinned up at Hoseok.  “Put us in, coach!”

Hoseok laughed and reached down to ruffle Soonyoung’s hair teasingly.  “Ah, what are we going to do with you two brats?  Alright, five minutes.”  With that, he bounced away again – seriously, did he just have springs built into his feet? – and Minghao turned to glare at Soonyoung.

“You liar, you do _not_ know the choreo.  You weren’t here for the last two weeks.”

Soonyoung just shrugged and continued to stretch, the epitome of ease.  “I’ll pick it up.  It’s not like anyone’ll notice.”

And that was the thing, wasn’t it?  No one ever did notice when Soonyoung wasn’t there – no one mentioned it, his spot in the dance was filled in by someone else without any discussion at all.  It was like the universe was working overtime just to fill in any space that Soonyoung might have once occupied, to accommodate either his presence or absence in any situation.  Minghao had always been sorely tempted to ask some of the club members about Soonyoung when he wasn’t there, just to see if they even remembered his existence.  He wouldn’t have been surprised if they didn’t.

“Yo, someone’s phone is going off!”

Minghao glanced over at the wall where everyone’s bags were lined up, letting out a soft curse as he heard the electronic beat of whatever song Jihoon had set his ringtone to – because _this is quality shit, Minghao, you’ll thank me later_.  Hurriedly getting to his feet, Minghao walked over and swiped up his phone, resisting the urge to roll his eyes when he saw who was calling.  For a moment, he considered not answering, but after a few moments of internal debate slipped out into the hallway and raised the phone to his ear.  “Seokmin, what the actual f-”

“ _Don’t swear, or Jeonghan’ll get mad at you for letting me hear it_.”

Minghao fell silent, blinking in shock at the high-pitched voice of the Maze’s youngest member.  “Chan?  How’d you get Seokmin’s phone?”

“ _It wasn’t hard_.”  The voice on the other end of the line held all of the bluntness that only a seven-year-old psychic child could have.

Just barely resisting the urge to snap back at the kid for being a smartass, Minghao exhaled slowly before speaking again.  “Alright then.  _Why_ do you have Seokmin’s phone, and why are you calling me on it?”

There was silence for a few seconds, followed by a munching sound.  The brat had probably raided Jihoon’s candy stash again.  “ _Jus’ wanted to see if you were dead_.”

_Excuse you?_

“If I was _what_?”  Despite himself, Minghao felt a trickle of fear crawl its way down his spine, his knees going slightly weak as he sank back against the wall.  There was something inherently creepy about a child talking about death, but it was doubled when that child usually had front-row seats to the future.  “Why would I be dead?”           

“ _You’re not_.”  Chan sounded remarkably unconcerned, to Minghao’s annoyance.  He would have at least hoped the kid would be _slightly_ worried in the case of his possible untimely demise.  “ _Don’t worry, you’re not gonna die.  Not really, anyway._ ”

“Chan, that’s not really comforting, hearing that I’m ‘not really’ going to die.”  Minghao couldn’t help but glance nervously down the hall, half expecting some sort of mask-wearing murderer with a steak knife to be sneaking up on him.  “Got anything more specific?”

“ _S’pacific?_ ”  Sometimes it was easy to forget just how young Chan really was, given his usual…precocity.  (That was the word that Jeonghan used for it, anyways.  Everyone else in the Maze called it ‘ _little-shit-ness’_.)  “ _Um…no, not really.  You’re not gonna die though, ‘cause you’re gonna bring me ice cream tomorrow._ ”

Well.  That was slightly comforting, in any case.  Chan’s predictions had one of the highest accuracy rates in the Maze, and he was definitely never wrong about ice cream. 

Forcing himself to relax and doing his best to ignore the niggling doubt that remained in the back of his mind, Minghao let out a sigh and straightened up again.  “Okay.  Thanks for calling then, kid.  I’ve gotta go back to practice now.”

“ _’Kay._ ”

“ _Chan, there you are, it’s-  What are you doing with my phone, you little-”_

The call cut almost immediately.  Shaking his head slightly, Minghao pushed down any remaining discomfort and quickly slipped back into the studio, where Hoseok was gathering everybody to run through the choreo.  He was going to be just fine, Chan had said.  He wasn’t going to _die_ , of all ridiculous things.

Well.  Not really, anyway.  

 

* * *

 

 

Distraction is the best antidote to remembrance.  Someone had told him that once, and Minghao had thought it’d sounded like a pretty impressive saying.

Then again, it might have been a bit more impressive if the person telling him hadn’t been an extremely high Seungcheol, who’d immediately been smacked over the head by Jihoon and yelled at to _“Stop being fake deep, you piece of shit stoner._ ”

In retrospect though, Minghao didn’t think that Seungcheol had been that far off.  One would think that a prophecy of their (possible) death would occupy the forefront of anyone’s mind, but Minghao managed to completely ignore any worry throughout dance practice, then through the very late dinner that Hoseok treated everyone to afterwards.  In fact, it wasn’t until he was walking home by himself at almost ten o’clock at night, the deserted road lit only by the half-moon up in the sky, that Minghao found himself thinking about Chan’s words once more.

Usually he walked home with Soonyoung, and his perpetually hyper friend definitely would have been a welcome distraction from the creeping worry, but Soonyoung had disappeared halfway through dinner.  No one had said a word or made any reference to it, though Minghao thought he’d seen a guy in his year’s eyes lingering for a second too long on the empty seat where Soonyoung had been.  So Minghao only had the company of the trees on the side of the road as he walked home in the dark, the sound of his feet against the asphalt echoed by the soft chatter of the forest as it watched him slowly trek by. 

‘Not really’ going to die.  What the hell did that even mean?  Did it have any connection to the way that Soonyoung was ‘not really’ dead?  Had Chan been saying that Minghao was going to end up like Soonyoung?  No offense to his best friend, but Minghao wasn’t sure that was what he wanted for an afterlife. 

Distraction may have been the antidote to remembrance, but it could also be dangerous.  Particularly, say, if one is walking alone on a winding, single-lane road at night and is too busy contemplating their own mortality to notice the slight shaking of the ground, the sound of an approaching engine, or the chatter of the trees steadily growing in volume as they scream _watch out watch out WATCH OUT WATCH OUT WATCH OUT!!_

Minghao turned, just in time for the motorcycle to slam into him at full force.  Pain, pure unadulterated pain like nothing he’d ever experienced bloomed through his entire body as he felt his ribs shatter, his feet leave the ground, and his eyes widened, mouth open in an aborted cry of complete agony as the moment stretched out like a rubber band…

The rubber band snapped, and Minghao was back on his feet, turning around as the motorcycle screamed towards him.

The bike jerked sharply to the right and just barely careened past him, one of the handlebars smacking into his arm and knocking him back.  Minghao stumbled, just barely aware of the motorcycle skidding onto its side as its driver desperately tried to stop, but then his legs gave out and Minghao felt himself tipping backwards. 

His elbows hit the road first, his backpack taking the brunt of the impact, then his head cracked onto the asphalt.  It bounced once, hard, but the resulting pain was almost nothing in comparison to the full-body agony that he’d just experienced.  Minghao gasped as the air was forced from his lungs, vision going black as his ears filled with a loud ringing that sounded like the trees screaming.

When the noise in his ears finally faded, Minghao blinked his eyes open – he hadn’t even realized they’d been shut.  His vision swam above him, slowly consolidating into the shape of a vaguely-familiar face.  His entire head was throbbing with an intense pain, and he slowly realized that the person leaning over him was talking, voice high-pitched with panic and words jumbling together.

“ – shit shit shit, please wake the fuck up, I’m _so_ sorry, I swear I didn’t mean almost hit you like that, I mean who would actually try to hit someone, right?  That was stupid, I don’t know why I said it, it’s the headlights, they’ve been out for weeks and I know I should’ve gotten it fixed, but I didn’t expect anyone to be walking on the road this late, and - ”

Minghao blinked as cognition slowly returned.  His eyes focused in on swept-back black hair, tan skin, angular features and full lips currently turned down in an extremely worried expression, and he realized, _oh, it’s the guy from Chem lab,_ at the same time that another voice in his brain whispered, _oh, he’s hot_.

_Really, thirsty side?  Not the best time._

After a few seconds of trying to reconnect his tongue to his brain, Minghao managed to open his mouth.  Unfortunately what ended up coming out wasn’t the intended _I’m okay please stop freaking out_ or even the equally understandable _What the hell just happened_.  Instead, Minghao blinked a few times and then said, “You’re the hot guy from Chem lab.” Fan-fucking-tastic.

_Let’s go back to the part where I’m pretty sure I was dying, that was way preferable to this._

If anything, his words at least made the guy stop babbling, rose-petal lips hanging open in an expression of complete shock.  “Oh my god,” he finally said, sounding if anything even more freaked-out than before.  “You have a concussion.”

“No, I – forget I said that,” Minghao managed to grit out, waving a hand and ignoring the sharp stinging from his elbow.  He must have skinned it when he fell.  He was also still laying on top of his backpack, which was all types of uncomfortable, and man, he _really_ hoped that his laptop was okay.  “I’m fine, I don’t have a concussion, I caught myself mostly.  Just hurts.” 

Moving slowly, he managed to push himself up into a sitting position, and the guy hurriedly moved back from where he’d been crouched over Minghao.  Doing his best to ignore the pain at the back of his skull, Minghao stole another glance at the boy next to him, who still looked extremely worried, eyes flicking back and forth quickly as his fingers fidgeted with the sleeves of his leather jacket.  There was a motorcycle helmet lying in the middle of the road a few feet away, as if it had been thrown off in a hurry, and the motorcycle itself – a black, hulking thing – was laying off to the side.  Minghao stared at it.

That thing had hit him.  He was absolutely certain of it.  He had _felt_ it hit him, felt his bones break as it threw him backwards at full speed, and had known for one endless, heart-stopping moment that he’d been about to die. 

But he hadn’t died.  Not really.

 _Dammit, Chan_.

A low cough pulled Minghao out of his thoughts, and he turned his attention back to the guy next to him.  “Are you…are you sure you’re okay?  You hit the ground pretty hard, man.” 

“You hit me harder,” Minghao replied automatically, seeing the guy’s ( _dark brown, very pretty_ his brain unhelpfully supplied) eyes widen in shock, probably at the sass in the comeback.  “Look, I- What’s your name again?  I don’t think we’ve ever talked, and I’m shit at names anyways.”  Curse his inability to be anything but an ass to people he found attractive. 

“We haven’t,” the guy replied, eyes flicking down for a moment.  Minghao guessed he was feeling pretty awkward given the situation.  “Wen Junhui.”

Minghao nodded slowly.  “Xu Minghao.”

“I know.”  This time the guy’s – Junhui’s – expression shifted to one of embarrassment at the suddenness of his own reply.  “I mean, I’ve heard your lab partner say it before.  He’s kind of loud.”

“No kidding.”  Minghao dragged his hand down his face, then reached back to touch the throbbing spot on his head, wincing a bit as his fingers made contact.  “So, care to explain what just happened?”

Junhui blinked at him.  “Look, I’m _really_ sorry, okay?  My headlights have been out for a while, so I didn’t really see you until the last second.  I just barely managed to pull the bike out of the way…”

Minghao shook his head, pushing himself further upright with a slight wince.  “No, not that.  How did you make it so you didn’t hit me?  I mean…you hit me.  You _actually_ hit me, not just with the handlebar.  And then you didn’t, which I’m totally grateful for.  I prefer not being dead.  I’m just wondering how.”

In the time that Minghao was talking, an almost impressive variety of expressions flickered over Junhui’s face.   Minghao thought that he caught shock, then wariness, but then the progression was too fast for him to catch before the other boy’s facial features slid into a perfect veneer of complete, innocent confusion, one that Minghao distrusted almost instantly.

“What are you talking about?  I mean, I almost hit you, yeah.  But there’s no way I hit you straight on, you wouldn’t be sitting up like this otherwise.” 

“I’m aware,” Minghao replied, unable to keep the slightly scathing tone out of his voice.  “Given that I _felt_ it.”

Junhui stood up, face still composed as he shook his head, but Minghao could see how those dark brown eyes had hardened minutely.  “Maybe you hit your head harder than you thought.  You sound like you’re imagining things.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Minghao said as he scrambled to stand up as well, only lying a little bit because his head did still hurt like a bitch.  He did his best to glare at the other boy, who was starting to back away slowly, and realized with no small amount of annoyance that Wen Junhui was taller than him.  _Figures_.  “And I’m not imagining things, jackass.”

“I just saved your life, you know,” Junhui snapped back at him, eyes flashing.

“What th-  You’re the one who put it in danger in the first place!”  The absolute _nerve_ of this guy, really.  _Why are the hot ones always assholes?_

Junhui was shaking his head, still backing away as he bent down to grab his helmet.  “Doesn’t matter.  Look, if you’re fine, and you’re just planning to insult me and spout nonsense, I’m gonna get out of here.”

Minghao’s mouth fell open with a slight popping noise, and he stared indignantly as Junhui jammed the helmet onto his head and moved back over to the bike, which had been running the whole time.  “That’s it?” Minghao demanded loudly, watching the other boy stand the bike back up and swing a leg over.  “Not even a ‘sorry for hitting you with my fucking deathtrap phallic compensation?’”

For a second, he thought that the other was going to drive away without replying, but the leather-clad figure paused, then flipped up the visor of the helmet, and Minghao felt his indignant fury double when he realized that Wen Junhui was _smirking_ at him.

“See you in lab, Minghao.”  Then the visor was back down, and the engine roared loudly once before the bike sprang back to life and tore away, leaving Minghao gaping after the motorcycle as it was quickly swallowed up by the darkness, Wen Junhui with it.

 For a moment, there was silence.  Then one of the trees on the side of the road giggled.  _Oh, that’s cute_.

Minghao spun around, fixing it with the full force of his glare.  “ _Excuse you?_ ”  The tree didn’t reply, but Minghao could hear the entire forest tittering with amusement at his reaction. 

“What a fucking asshole,” Minghao muttered, shrugging his backpack higher up on his shoulders as he turned to start walking again.  “Couldn’t even offer me a ride home after killing me.”

Well, not-really killing him. 

He definitely owed Chan some ice cream tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello~
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who left kudos and kind words on the first chapter! Y'all really know how to get a dude inspired.
> 
> One of my favorite characters in this story to write is in this chapter ten points if you guess who it is.

This is how the Maze worked: it didn’t.

The Maze was less a mansion and more an originally normal house that had been added onto, then added onto again, then someone with completely different tastes had done _another_ addition, but that person was a warlock so they didn’t have to think about shit like engineering or reality, then another person added on, and so on and so forth until the place was eventually just an amalgamation of disjointed rooms that had barely any rhyme or reason between them.  There were secret doors, staircases that led to nowhere, rooms on the upper floors that were held up entirely by one very determined column, bathrooms _inside_ of other bathrooms, and one elevator that you could never be sure where the doors would open once you stepped inside.

The entire thing was an architectural disaster sprawling over four and a half acres.  Minghao was convinced that it would have collapsed long ago if it weren’t for the sheer amount of magic flowing through the place.

The front door was probably the only relatively normal part of the house.  It was light blue – a perfectly respectable front door color – with the normal number of doorknobs: that is, one.  The only slightly unusual feature was the chalkboard stand out front, like the ones that stood outside of coffee shops and bars.  Jeonghan had procured it, and no one had bothered asking how, knowing that the most likely answer was that he had in fact stolen it from a coffee shop or bar. 

One side of the sign was always maintained perfectly, and read:

_PSYCHIC READINGS.  ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.  WALK INS WELCOME._

In smaller lettering, beneath that:

 _Future on request.  No exchanges, no refunds, no whining_.

The other side of the sign changed on an almost daily basis, and could say any number of things, depending on who had last gotten hold of the chalk. 

For instance, Seungcheol had once written:

_FELLATIO ON REQUEST_

Because Seungcheol’s sense of humor apparently had never matured beyond the ‘lol penis’ stage.  On the other hand, usually when Jihoon got to write something, the sign would bear some variation of:

_FUCK CHOI SEUNGCHEOL_

or:

_PIECE OF SHIT SOMETIMES-FUCKBUDDY FOR SALE, REAL CHEAP_

Jeonghan had yelled at him for that one, reminding him that Chan saw the sign when he left for school every day.  No one had had the guts to tell him that Chan had been the one to draw the picture of a sad puppy dog Seungcheol with a scowling Jihoon on the bottom of the sign. 

It wasn’t always something dirty or otherwise offensive.  Once it had simply said:

                _WILL BUY PARSNIPS_

That one had been Seokmin.  Apparently he’d been craving parsnips and had been convinced that someone would just so happen to stop by and be willing to sell them.  He hadn’t been wrong, but the ridiculousness remained.

Seungkwan almost never wrote on the sign.  The teenager claimed he was above the rest of the house’s immaturity, but Minghao had caught him drawing scarily detailed dicks in rainbow chalk when he thought no one else was home.

Minghao usually liked to decorate the board with whatever shitty puns he’d recently found on the internet.  Not because he himself was any major fan of puns, but because they pissed Jihoon off to no end, and that was always amusing.

Alright, so maybe the sign wasn’t actually that normal.  Minghao had definitely seen more than a few clients give it an odd look as they entered the Maze.  But compared to the rest of the place, it was positively benign.

On that particular night, as Minghao finally reached the Maze – a process that had taken a lot longer than normal, given the whole sort-of dying incident – the sign read in large, shaky letters: _DONT TUCH DOG._ There was a stuffed dog balanced precariously on top of the sign.  Minghao assumed that it knew what it was doing, so he didn’t touch it and went inside. 

And sometimes Minghao _really_ liked living in a house full of psychics, because the second he stepped through the door Seungcheol was there, sitting at the bottom of the staircase with a blunt in one hand and an icepack held out in the other.   

“You’re my hero,” Minghao groaned, letting his bag drop onto the ground and toeing off his shoes before taking the icepack gratefully.  He brought it around to the back of his head, wincing a bit as it touched the painful spot. 

“Thanks.  You should repeat that in front of Jihoon sometime, do me a solid.”  Seungcheol leaned his head against the railing and clamped his lips over the unlit end of the blunt, glassy yet somehow still razor-sharp eyes flicking over Minghao’s scraped elbows.  “So what happened?”

Minghao poked at one of the scrapes with his free hand, wincing at the sting.  “Can you call a family meeting, actually?  I think I want to ask everyone about it.”

That was another nice thing about Seungcheol.  Where Jihoon would have bitched and Jeonghan would have fussed and Seungkwan would have whined and Seokmin probably wouldn’t have even been paying attention in the first place, Seungcheol just studied him critically for a few moments over the end of the blunt, then pulled it from his lips, exhaled smoke and said, “Sure.”  Picking up the megaphone that was kept at the base of the stairs for this exact purpose, he pointed it in the general direction of the ceiling and yelled, “ _YO, FAMILY MEETING IN THE READING ROOM, ASAP,”_ and then as an afterthought added “ _NOT YOU CHAN, IT’S WAY PAST YOUR BEDTIME. GO TO SLEEP, KID._ ”  Minghao squeezed his way past the staircase, not waiting to see if Seungcheol was following him as he made his way down the hall towards the reading room. 

The reading room was so called because it was where members of the Maze – apart from Minghao and Chan, because one was Not Psychic and the other was seven – saw their clients.  On insistence from Jihoon, there had been a token effort to decorate it in the guise of a stereotypical psychic’s den.  In other words, there were a few gauzy strips of fabric draped around the room and plenty of candles, but there was also Seungkwan’s karaoke machine and two bright yellow couches that Seungcheol and Seokmin had found in a dumpster, and Chan usually forgot to pick up his toys so there were always more than a few Legos lying in wait for unsuspecting people to step on. 

Like the rest of the house, it both worked and it didn’t. 

Minghao collapsed onto one of the couches, still holding the ice pack to his head even though his fingers were starting to go numb.  After a few seconds, Seungcheol joined him, blunt no longer in sight but moving in a very liquid fashion as he curled up on the end of the other couch. 

It took less than a minute for everyone else to arrive.  Seungkwan first, then Seokmin – who climbed in through the window, for some reason – then Jihoon, who looked grumpy at being disturbed but mildly curious all the same.  Minghao did his best not to wince sympathetically at the way Seungcheol visibly perked up like a puppy seeing its master at the other’s arrival, eagerly scooting over to make extra room on the couch.  Jihoon glared, but settled in next to Seungcheol without argument, so Minghao guessed that they were on relatively good terms at the moment.

“ _Hao_!”  The unusually peaceful atmosphere was broken as Jeonghan darted to Minghao’s side, immediately starting to fuss over his scraped elbows and running searching fingers through his hair.  “What happened to you?  Are you bleeding?  Why the hell did you dye your hair red, I can’t see if there’s any blood…”

“I’m fine, hyung,” Minghao sighed, even as he allowed Jeonghan to continue his motherly investigation.  “I don’t think it’s bleeding, I didn’t even hit the ground that hard.” 

“Oh, good.”  The soft touches to his hair disappeared, only to immediately be replaced with Jeonghan smacking him on the forehead.  “Then that’s for worrying me!” the elder snapped, eyes flashing and clearly ignoring Minghao’s yelp of pain.  He went back to stroking Minghao’s hair though, so the Chinese boy settled back into the comforting touch with only a slight grumble.  “What happened?” Jeonghan repeated. 

“I got hit by a motorcycle.”

“You _what_?”  Jeonghan’s exclamation was echoed by gasps of shock from both Seungkwan and Jihoon, while Seokmin screamed a bit, probably because screaming was often Seokmin’s response to strong emotions. 

Seungcheol’s eyes widened.  “Whoa.  That’s hardcore, kid.” 

Jihoon smacked him immediately, glaring.  “Don’t be such an insensitive dickhead.” 

“Nah, it was kind of funny, I guess,” Minghao shrugged.  “The second time, anyways.  The first one was just awful.” 

“Back up.”  Jihoon leaned forward, frowning, and Minghao could practically see how his fingers twitched towards the pocket he knew held his tarot cards.  “You got hit twice?”

Minghao shook his head slowly, biting his lip as he tried to think of the best way to explain.  “That’s the thing, I really don’t know.  I was…  It was dark, and I didn’t hear the bike coming.  By the time I turned around it was right on me.  It sounds impossible, but I felt it hit me.  I felt my ribs break.  It was…” 

Minghao paused, a shiver running up his spine as he tried to think of the words to conjure up that moment of intense suffering. 

“I was dying.  I _know_ I was dying.  But then the next second, it was like it had never happened, and the bike zoomed straight past me.  I fell over and hit my head.”  It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them about Junhui, but for whatever reason he felt himself stopping before the words came out. 

Clearing his throat, he looked around the room.  His housemates were all wearing similar expressions of dumbfounded shock, staring at him with wide eyes.  Seokmin, though, perched over on the window seat across the room, was giving him a very pointed look that seemed to say _I know what you’re leaving out_ , and Minghao was forcibly reminded that his same-age friend was the most talented in their house at detecting untruths – which, unfortunately, also included half-truths. 

Whatever.  He’d talk to Seokmin about it later.  Refocusing on the others, Minghao raised his eyebrows.  “So, what do you all think?  Could someone have cast a spell or something to undo the crash?  A witch, maybe, or warlock?” 

Even before the words were fully out of his mouth, Jihoon was shaking his head at him.  “Absolutely not.  Minghao, you’re talking about turning back time.  There’s no spell, potion, charm or curse that could do anything even remotely like that.” 

“He’s right,” Seungcheol agreed with a slow nod.  “And probably for good reason.  I mean, can you imagine if every witch or warlock could control time?  The world would never progress at all.  We’d keep getting caught in time loops every time someone didn’t like how their Tuesday turned out.” 

Minghao huffed, tilting his head a bit to allow Jeonghan to continue stroking his hair.  He’d figured as much, but what other explanation was possible?  “So what was it, then?”

For a moment, there was silence in the room, then Jeonghan’s hand stilled and pulled away.  “Let’s find out,” the elder said decisively.  “Let’s do a reading.  I’d say Star Guide spread.” 

“I’ll do it.”  Seungcheol’s voice was a sleepy drawl as he reached towards his jacket pocket and drew out the battered deck of cards. 

Jihoon snorted.  “You’re stoned as fuck.” 

Seungcheol fixed him with a vacant stare, hands shuffling the cards with sure, practiced movements.  “Your point?”  Without waiting for a reply, he beckoned towards Minghao with a jerk of his head.  And no one bothered arguing, not even Jihoon, because they all knew he was right.  Seungcheol was the most powerful psychic in the house, and probably a contender for most powerful in the country.  Even stoned as fuck, his clairvoyance was miles above everyone else’s.

Setting the icepack down – it had mostly melted, anyways – Minghao moved to sit on the floor in front of Seungcheol, who also slid down from the couch so that they were sat cross-legged a few feet apart, facing each other.  The soft noises of shuffling cards stopped as Seungcheol’s hands stilled, and he held out the deck to Minghao, who’d been read by his housemates often enough over the past several years to know what to do.  He stretched out his hand and placed it on top of the deck.

“Focus your mind,” Seungcheol said, slow voice taking on an almost hypnotic quality as Minghao stared hard at the cards beneath his fingers.  “Gather your intention and ask what it is you need to know.”

Silence reigned once more as Minghao inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again and then asked, “What happened to me tonight?”

The moment the words were out, the energy in the room changed, enough that even Minghao, who didn’t have a psychic bone in his body, could feel it.  As if he’d asked something taboo, and the universe was now eying him warily as it decided whether or not to give up the answer.

He heard someone – Jeonghan, maybe – breathe out shakily, and could see Seungkwan twitching nervously out of the corner of his eye.  Seungcheol, however, seemed completely calm as he set the deck on the ground, then spread them with a practiced sweep of his hand.  “Draw six cards, please.  Pick the ones that appeal to you.”

It was the same instructions every time – the number of cards varied, but other than that it was the same – and yet as always, Minghao found himself grabbing six cards much too quickly and then worrying that he hadn’t thought it out well enough.  Seungcheol seemed to think it was okay, though, because he set the rest of the deck aside before taking the chosen cards from Minghao’s hands and laying them out in a five-pointed formation, one card in the middle. 

“Ready?”

Minghao couldn’t find it in himself to respond, the atmosphere of the room growing heavier and more tension-ridden by the moment, so he just nodded.

Seungcheol flipped over the first card, at the top of the star, and everyone in the room leaned forward at once to see what it was.

“Well,” Minghao finally managed to say, staring down at the faded drawing of a young man with swords driven into his back.  “That’s sort of what it felt like.”

Seungcheol tilted his head to the side slowly, looking more as if one ear had simply become too heavy for him rather than conscious of the movement.  “Ten of swords.  Upright, in the position indicating your current situation.” 

“Ten of swords…”  Minghao racked his brain, trying to remember the card’s significance but coming up blank. 

“The card of endings,” Seungcheol said.  “Beginnings too, though.  So I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume you just had _some_ sort of transformative experience.  Congrats, Hao.”

“Thanks,” Minghao replied automatically, before wondering whether that was the right thing to say in this situation.  “Possibility that my life was the thing that ended and then began again?”

Seungcheol shrugged.  “Unlikely, but it’s not like we can prove otherwise.”  Minghao heard someone let out a skeptical snort – probably Jihoon, or maybe Seungkwan – but ignored it as he watched Seungcheol flip the second card, and…

“Has it always looked like that?” Minghao blurted out before he could stop himself.

Seungcheol looked up, eyebrows raised.  “Pardon?”

“That card.” Minghao gestured vaguely, hoping that his voice remained steady enough to not rouse anyone’s suspicions.  Based on the unmistakable air of tension behind him, he doubted he was succeeding.  “Has it always looked like that?” Chancing a glance over his shoulder, Minghao winced a bit and quickly looked away again from the four intense stares, his housemates looking like a pack of hyenas that had just noticed a hint of weakness in their prey. 

Only Seungcheol seemed to remain completely disinterested, studying the card with a look of nonchalance before shrugging.  “Yeah, pretty sure.  I haven’t changed out any cards in the deck, anyways.”

“Huh.” Minghao didn’t say anything else, but he felt like the card _must_ have changed.  Because he was pretty sure that he would have noticed that the Knight of Wands in Seungcheol’s deck had the face of Wen Junhui, smirk firmly in place as it sat astride the dark black horse the same way the other boy had sat astride that damn motorcycle earlier. 

“The cause of your current problem,” Seungcheol was saying, and Minghao hurriedly pulled his attention away from just gawking at the card like an idiot.  An obvious idiot.  “Knight of Wands in a reverse position.”  And then any hope Minghao had that Seungcheol had remained unsuspicious was dashed to bits as his housemate looked up at him, eyebrows raised expectantly.  “Someone isn’t telling you the truth.”

 _Well duh, I could tell for myself that he was lying_.  Minghao could practically _feel_ his housemates’ anticipation as they waited for him to say something.  Instead, he just ducked his head to stubbornly stare at the cards again.  After a few moments of silence, he heard Seungcheol sigh, and then the third card was flipped over.

“Three of cups, upright.”  Seungcheol’s fingers traced over the three women dancing together, goblets raised in the air.  “In the position representing changes needed to face this situation.  I think…you may be about to make some new friends.”

“Me?” Minghao blurted out before he could stop himself.  “Sorry, but you’ve met me, right?  I have exactly one friend – besides you guys,” he added hurriedly, in response to Jeonghan and Seungkwan’s pointed expressions.  “I have one other friend and he's dead.  I’m not exactly good at being around…normal people.  The whole ‘six psychic roommates and talking to plants’ thing is a bit of a conversation killer.”

“More abnormal people, then,” Jeonghan suggested smoothly.  “People like us.  They do exist, you know.”

Minghao wrinkled his nose slightly, but didn’t reply.  He’d met a couple of witches and a warlock before, as well as Jihoon’s exorcist brother.  He wasn’t much more comfortable around them than he was with nonmagical humans.  He’d accepted his own antisocial nature a while ago, and he liked things the way they were - he had Soonyoung and his housemates, and occasional, casual interaction with people like Mingyu or his dance team members.  The idea of suddenly having new friends just seemed too weird to him to be true.

“You may not have a choice in the matter,” Seungcheol said, doing that weird thing where he seemed to respond to Minghao’s thoughts rather than his words.  “And according to the cards, if you are to get through…whatever this is, these friends may be necessary.”  Without waiting for a reply, he moved to the fourth card and flipped it.  “Your strengths in this situation…”

“Oh come _on_.”  This time it was Seungkwan who had the outburst, though Minghao found himself agreeing quietly with the sixteen year old as he stared down at…

“Strength,” Seungcheol mused, examining the worn image of a young woman with her hands wrapped around a lion.  “Well that’s a bit ironic, I suppose.  Though it doesn’t necessarily mean _strength_ per say, of course.  More of faith in yourself and your abilities as a way to help you through this hardship.  It’s a positive omen, don’t worry.”

 _What abilities do I have?_ Minghao wondered blankly.  He didn’t think talking to trees was that helpful in most situations – compared to the abilities of his roommates, after all, it was practically a useless party trick.

Apparently realizing that Minghao wasn’t going to say anything regarding the Strength card, Seungcheol moved on, hand grazing over the card on the bottom right corner for a second before flipping it over. “Other challenges – nine of swords.  Huh.”  Minghao noticed how Seungcheol’s lips twitched downwards almost imperceptibly, eyes blinking liquidly.  “Interesting.  Not one I expected.”

“What does it mean?” Minghao heard himself ask, then immediately groaned to himself, already knowing what the other would say.

“Dunno.  Could mean anything, really.  This whole thing is all up to interpretation anyways, you know - ” 

“ _But_ ,” Jihoon butted in, shooting Seungcheol a glare.  “Nine of swords often represents anxieties, fears, nightmares.  Have you been having any of those lately?”

Minghao stared.  “You’re asking me, a college student, if I’m ever anxious?”

Jihoon hesitated, then nodded with apparent resignation.  “Fair enough.” 

Almost as if the entire exchange hadn’t happened around him, Seungcheol was already moving on to the final, center card.  “And last, the final outcome.”

The card was flipped, and Minghao found himself leaning forward to see – “The Wheel of Fortune?  That’s good, right?”

His question was met with a variety of noncommittal noises from around the room.  “’Fortune’ is a bit of a misnomer,” Seungcheol drawled.  He was blinking a lot more than earlier – either his high was wearing off or getting more intense, Minghao couldn’t tell.  “It’s more of just…a wheel.  Keeps spinning, nothing the rest of us can do to stop it.  It’s basically a reminder that the Universe doesn’t give a shit about us little ants down here.”  He paused, eyes focusing for a moment, and Minghao suddenly felt very much like an ant, pinned down beneath the other’s gaze.  “Sometimes the Universe has plans for us that cannot be avoided.”

Silence followed that pronouncement, and Minghao felt once again as if the entire universe was indeed, watching them.  Then Seokmin sneezed, Seungcheol blinked, and the moment was lost.  The intensity melted away instantly, and he was once more just sitting in the reading room surrounded by his five weirdo roommates. 

“Well that barely told us _anything_ ,” Seungkwan was complaining, while Jeonghan and Jihoon leaned forward to examine the cards closer and started arguing about interpretations.  Minghao wasn’t sure whether he was in agreement or not this time.  He felt as if he _had_ been told a lot, but it was as if all the words were in a foreign language that just spun around in his head without any actual comprehension. 

Slowly, he stood up, ignoring how everyone else in the room was suddenly silent and watching him.  “I’m gonna go to bed,” he said slowly, running a hand through his hair and wincing as he accidentally touched the sore spot.  “It’s been…a _really_ long day.”

A couple of his roommates – mainly Jihoon – looked as if they wanted to argue, wanted him to stay downstairs so they could continue discussing his somewhat-death, but Jeonghan shot the other boy a poisonous glance before smiling at Minghao.  “Of course, Hao.  Get your rest, okay?  Just skip your classes if you’re not feeling well in the morning.”

Minghao nodded automatically at the good/bad advice – and really, that was Jeonghan in a nutshell – as he half-stumbled his way out of the room, mumbling a goodnight and hearing five goodnights chorus in return.  Feet moving on autopilot, he pushed his way through the tapestry hiding the door to yet another staircase, unthinkingly stepping over the trick stair as he made his way upstairs, already thinking about how nice it was going to be to lay down in his warm, soft bed…             

“I told you so.”

If anyone asked, Minghao most certainly did _not_ jump at the sudden voice.  Anyone who didn’t ask and instead just watched, on the other hand, might have seen him almost miss the last step and stumble slightly onto the landing, managing to bang his already-scraped elbow against the bannister. 

“Mother _fuuuu_ \- Hey kid, didn’t see you there,” Minghao grunted, hissing slightly as he twisted his arm around to make sure he hadn’t broken skin. 

From the doorway of his bedroom to the left, Chan regarded him with a completely blank face, dressed in a dinosaur onesie with a threadbare teddy bear dangling from one hand.  The image would have been somewhat adorable if it weren’t for aforementioned blank expression, and for the fact that Minghao was pretty sure the kid was thinking about his almost-death.

“I told you that you weren’t really gonna die,” Chan repeated, bringing up the non-teddy-bear containing hand to nibble at his thumbnail.  “And I was right.”

“Yeah, as usual.”  Deciding that his elbow was probably okay, Minghao moved across the landing towards the second flight of stairs, the ones leading up to his own room.  As he passed Chan, he dropped a hand on the kid’s head to ruffle the messy black hair.  “I’ll bring you ice cream tomorrow, as promised.”

Surprisingly Chan didn’t reply as Minghao ascended the stairs, and he found himself filling the silence with words instead, as if they were pulled from him rather than being produced from a conscious decision.  “Thanks for the warning, but hopefully this was all just some big…weird thing that'll go away in the morning, like it didn’t happen at all.”

He opened the door to his room, and Chan still didn’t reply, but before he could actually step in he heard that same certain tone of voice once more.  “It won’t.”

Minghao turned back around to look down the stairs again, hand still on the doorknob as he met Chan’s eyes, as always too sharp for his age, giving Minghao the feeling that he was talking to someone much older and more experienced than himself.  “It can’t go away yet.  It’s just gotten to the beginning.”  Chan tilted his head to the side, steely gaze still unwavering in its intensity.  “You’re gonna have to finish the story.”

Minghao blinked, which proved to be a mistake as he immediately felt like prey that had shown weakness in front of a much stronger animal.  “Uh.  Okay.  I’ll just…do that, then.”

Chan still didn’t look away, but some of the intensity in the eye contact faded as he smiled, innocent and benign and suddenly looking like a first-grader once more.  “Goodnight, Minghao.  Don’t forget the ice cream, pretty please.”

“Goodnight, kid.  I won’t.”  Taking a step back into his room, Minghao slowly closed the door, maintaining eye contact with Chan as he did so because he was not going to lose a staring contest with a seven-year-old, dammit. 

Said seven-year-old remained unblinking the entire time, and even after the door was shut and Minghao was staring at the grainy wood right in front of him, it was still a few seconds before he finally heard tiny socked feet shuffling away.  Shoulders dropping immediately, Minghao exhaled with a loud groan as he let his head fall forward slightly to thump against the door. 

“So, who’s the guy?”

Eyes flying wide and a curse that Jeonghan would probably chew him out for the next day falling from his lips, Minghao spun around to see Seokmin lounging on his bed, head propped on one arm in a suggestive pose clearly calculated to be the most unnerving for Minghao to see.

Grabbing the object closest and throwing it at his friend’s head – it so happened to be a book, and Minghao had no sympathy for Seokmin’s yelp of pain, at least it was paperback – he let out another groan, this one of frustration.  “Sit the fuck up.  I’m terrified that one day you’re actually not going to be wearing clothes when you do that.” 

He knew it was no use asking how Seokmin had gotten up to his room before him, or how he had gotten in at all when Minghao had been standing in front of the door talking to Chan.  Seokmin knew the Maze and all of its secrets better than anyone, even Seungcheol, who technically owned it.  Appearing in Minghao’s room with no apparent possible entryway was by far not the strangest thing he had accomplished.

“Ah, tempting, but I think I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities a little longer,” Seokmin replied as he sat up.  Minghao scowled, fingers twitching for another book, but he was stopped short by Seokmin repeating his earlier question.  “So, who’s the guy?”

“There is no guy,” Minghao responded automatically, even though he already knew it would do no good.  Seokmin could smell – or more accurately, hear – a lie from a mile away, so there was no way the few meters of Minghao’s room was a great enough distance.  But Minghao was nothing if not stubborn, and he wasn’t about to give up any information without a fight, dammit.

“Wen Junhui, huh?”

Minghao plopped down onto the floor in defeat, letting his head fall into his hands as he ignored Seokmin’s braying laughter.  “Do you _have_ to do that?”

“Sorry, you were all but screaming it at me,” Seokmin said, though he didn’t _sound_ sorry, in Minghao’s opinion.  Then again, Seokmin was the one with _auditory clairvoyance_ , as Jihoon called it, not him.  “So who is he?”

A sigh of defeat escaping him, Minghao raised his head from his hands to meet his friend’s all-too-curious gaze.  “He’s in my orgo lab.”

Seokmin nodded slowly, expression turning a bit more thoughtful now that he was apparently done teasing Minghao.  “And he hit you.”

“Not on purpose,” Minghao found himself saying, and wow, why was his first reaction to defend Wen Junhui?  Suddenly feeling a bit sheepish, he glanced down at the floor, fingers twisting in the thick blue carpet as he shrugged with attempted nonchalance. “But yeah, he hit me, and I kind of blacked out a little bit, I think.  The second time, after the whole ‘dying-not-dying’ thing.”

“Mm-hmm.”  Minghao couldn’t see Seokmin’s face, but he was almost certain the other had once again heard everything he didn’t quite say.  “And when you woke up?”

The sheepish feeling was replaced with one of slight mulishness, Minghao’s fingers tightening their hold.  “He was there.  Talked to him a bit.  Tried to get him to tell me what happened that made it so I got hit twice, but he just called me crazy and rode off into the sunset like a complete asshole.”

“Sounds like a real charmer,” Seokmin said, and there was something about the seemingly angelic smile on his friend’s face that had Minghao’s gaze narrowing as he scrambled the short distance across the floor to aim a punch at his thigh.  It just so happened to be within reach of Minghao’s fists, which was a dangerous place to be, especially if you were a body part belonging to Lee Seokmin.

“Ow!”  Seokmin yelped, curling up into a ball and pouting at Minghao.  “What was that for?”

“You deserved it and you know it,” he said, face flushing with what he hoped was annoyance – if anyone asked, he would definitely have said it was annoyance.  Maybe a bit of rage, too.  “It’s not like that.”

“As you’ve made clear,” Seokmin huffed, rubbing at his abused thigh with what Minghao thought was exaggerated care.  “So how come you’re still thinking about him?”

He stood up, poking Seokmin’s side so that the other boy moved over enough for Minghao to flop onto the bed next to him.  “’Cause he lied.  He’s the one not telling the truth from the reading.  He actually knows what happened, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”

From where he was lying on his back, Seokmin nodded, gaze still fixed on the uneven, piecemeal ceiling cutting through the air just above their heads.  Minghao had smacked his head on some of the lower portions too many times to count, but he still figured it had some sort of charm, in its lopsided way. 

“You think he did something?” Seokmin said finally.  “This Wen Junhui guy?” 

“I- I mean, yes.  Maybe?  I don’t know.”  Minghao pursed his lips, annoyance stabbing through him at the impossibility of the entire situation.  “I would try and corner him at lab and ask him again or something, but I mean... Would there really be a point?  What could he have even done?” 

“What do you mean?” Seokmin said.

“I _mean_ , you heard Jihoon and Cheol.  Messing with time is impossible.  Or at least, it should be.”

Seokmin’s eyes flicked towards him, and for a second the sibling resemblance between him and Chan was startling as Minghao blinked at the sharpness of his friend’s gaze.  “You ever consider that there may be more in this world than the things Cheol and Jihoon know?”

Minghao stared.  “So you….do you think I _should_ confront him?”  The thought of going up to Wen Junhui again, of looking at that annoyingly handsome face and demanding answers, was simultaneously equal parts satisfying and nerve-wracking. 

“That’s up to you,” Seokmin replied, sitting up and stretching his arms above his head in a yawn.  “But no matter what you choose, I don’t think this is going to be the end.”

 _You’re gonna have to finish the story_.

Minghao nodded tiredly, slowly pushing himself up as well.  “Yeah, that seems to be the general consensus.  I’ll decide before next orgo lab.  Now get out,” he added, stretching out one leg to poke Seokmin with his foot.  “I’ve had a hell of a day and I really need to get to sleep, because no matter what Jeonghan says I don’t think my professors are gonna take sort-of-dying as an excuse to not show up tomorrow.”

He shrugged out of his shirt as Seokmin climbed off the bed, leaning over to swipe the pajamas he’d left crumpled up by his pillow that morning. (Hey, they were still clean….ish.)  “Oh, and leave through the door please like a normal fucking person, not whatever creepy trapdoor or secret passage you used to get in here.”

Seokmin stopped where he’d been apparently heading towards Minghao’s desk, weirdly enough – Minghao made a mental note to carefully check the floor around the area later – and instead turned to walk towards the door.  “Well, if you insist.”  His friend paused in the doorway, looking at Minghao over his shoulder.  “Night, Hao.  Sorry you had a rough day, but hopefully things will calm down now.”

And Minghao may not have been psychic, but somehow he really doubted it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Maze is actually inspired by [The Winchester Mystery House](https://img.grouponcdn.com/deal/VGhwzsiffo5bk2FofAzjUi/2p-960x586/v1/c700x420.jpg), but also with magic involved. (Also if you haven't read the story of the mystery house go do that, it's pretty cool).
> 
> Again, kudos and comments are lovely, and leaving them inspires me to keep writing~ Or shoot me a message on [my kpop tumblr](http://yoongifox.tumblr.com/) to remind me that I must write to feed my future dogs. Thanks~


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I realize it has been a month, which is probably more realistic for my uploading schedule than every week. Incidentally it wasn't this chapter giving me trouble, but I told myself I wouldn't upload new chapters until I had the next chapter done. So Chapter 4 is the culprit. 
> 
> Anyways, enjoy~

Next orgo lab came sooner than expected. 

Physically, of course, it was the same amount of time as always.  Wednesdays are generally seven days apart no matter what is specifically happening on those days. 

(Of course, if Minghao had voiced this around Jihoon or Seungcheol he was sure they would have immediately launched into lectures on the nonlinear nature of time, Jihoon’s full of diagrams and a lot of punctuated gestures and Seungcheol’s full of a lot of _I dunno man, it’s like…squishy.  Like a rotten banana or….or a boob, or something._ )

(Honestly, Minghao wasn’t sure which explanation was worse)

Disregarding the actual amount of time, though, it _felt_ like orgo lab came much faster than it had any right to do.  The week following his not-quite-death experience was almost disconcertingly normal.  Minghao got up, argued with his housemates, went to class, hung out with Soonyoung, went to dance practice, went home, did his homework, went to bed.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  The only real reminders of what had happened were the slowly healing scrapes on his elbows and the fading soreness at the back of his skull. 

He hadn’t seen Wen Junhui at all in that time.  It had occurred to Minghao that he may see the handsome bastard (as he’d taken to calling the guy in his head, but only when his housemates weren’t around to mentally overhear) at his orgo lecture, since they presumably had the same lecturer if they were in the same lab section.

But the guy hadn’t shown up.  Minghao had even gotten to class early and sat himself in the back to give himself an ideal vantage point for scanning the lecture hall, but Wen Junhui hadn’t been in lecture on Thursday or the one on the next Tuesday.  Either the guy was a complete delinquent, or he was one of those lucky assholes who could not show up to lecture and still get good grades on the exams.  

(Part of Minghao wondered if Wen Junhui was avoiding him.  He then immediately wondered if that was a self-centered thing to think.)

As such, Minghao was almost surprised when he walked into orgo lab on Wednesday and saw familiar inky black hair that had been occupying an almost embarrassing portion of his thoughts over the last week. 

Minghao stopped in his tracks, a sudden wave of nerves rooting his feet to the floor.  He hadn’t actually decided what he was going to do.  Should he try to force Junhui into a conversation before lab started?  Maybe while they were doing the experiment and therefore he couldn’t leave?  Corner him in the hall after class?

As he stood there stewing in his own indecisiveness, the TA, whose desk Minghao hadn’t even realized he’d stopped next to, looked up and smiled.  “Ah, Minghao.  Can you do me a favor and pass back last week’s lab reports?  Thank you.” 

Minghao started slightly, managing to tear his gaze away from Wen Junhui – who seemed to be determinedly staring down at his lab notebook and not looking anywhere near Minghao – and turned towards the TA, blinking between the soft smile and the pile of graded papers on the corner of the desk.  “Uh, sure.”  He gathered them up in his hands, looking down at the top one and wincing as he realized that he didn’t actually know almost anyone’s name in his lab.  “Um... Shannon?”  A girl in the corner turned and raised her hand, and Minghao shuffled over to hand her the report.  The process repeated a few times, Minghao reading out the names automatically until he stumbled over one. 

“J-Jun.” 

He didn’t even look up to watch Wen Junhui raise his hand – because really, what were the chances of someone else being named Jun in their lab?  Instead, as he made his way across the room, he found his eyes drifting down towards the paper in his hand, moving as if without his permission and finding the numbers circled in red pen on the front.

_10/35._

_29%_

Unbidden, Minghao felt his eyebrows twitch upward slightly.  He raised his head, and realized with a jolt that Wen Junhui was in fact looking at him, and had very clearly just seen Minghao obviously judging his abysmal grade.

“Um.”  Minghao quickly held out the report, feeling his face flush slightly in shame at having been caught.  “H-here.”

Junhui snatched the paper quickly, eyebrows pulled down into a scowl, and yeah, Minghao had expected that.  What he hadn’t expected was the dark blush that rushed to stain the other’s cheeks, or the way Junhui quickly ducked his head once more, hands raking forward through his hair as if in an attempt to pull it down over his tomato-red face.

It was as if he was…embarrassed.  Minghao wouldn’t have thought the guy would give a shit.  That had certainly been the impression he had gotten of Wen Junhui so far. 

A throat cleared from somewhere in the room, and Minghao belatedly realized that he was literally just standing in front of Junhui’s work station staring down at the guy.  Cursing silently to himself, Minghao quickly turned away to continue handing out reports. 

After that, the entirety of lab was a blur.  Minghao felt as if he couldn’t focus, hands following the steps to the procedure automatically, his thoughts drifting to the dark-haired boy off to his right every few seconds.  It got so bad that Mingyu – _Mingyu_ , of all people – concernedly asked him if he’d been getting enough sleep lately.  He managed to change the topic by asking Mingyu about how baseball practice was going.  Usually the way Mingyu beamed at the question and launched into an excited description would have held Minghao’s full attention, but he found his focus drifting away again almost immediately.

A couple of times, he thought he felt someone’s eyes on him prickling at the back of his neck.  Every time he snuck a glance at the other boy though, Junhui was steadfastly bent over his experiment, face turned away and expression unreadable.

Minghao had to talk to him.  Somehow that one resolution pushed its way through the haze, that he wasn’t about to let the day pass without at least attempting to confront the other once more.  He wasn’t sure what led to this decision – maybe it was that one moment of embarrassment that made him think he could potentially get some answers this time.

Luckily enough for him, the experiment was the beginning of a two-parter, which meant that everyone had to stay the whole period.  As the three hours crawled to an end, and the TA moved around collecting everyone’s preliminary results, Minghao kept an eye on Wen Junhui.  The other boy seemed in a hurry to leave, practically ripping off his lab coat and goggles and shoving his notebook into his bag, and Minghao quickly hastened his own packing in response. 

Wen Junhui was out the door the second the TA dismissed them, and Minghao all but ran after him, ignoring Mingyu’s call of goodbye in his determination to not lose the other boy.

The hallways of the Chemistry building were crowded, students spilling out of labs and lecture halls, either bemoaning their next class or eager to get home, but Minghao managed to keep his eyes on Wen Junhui’s black hair and orange backpack up ahead as he determinedly wove through the crowd.  He had a feeling that the guy knew he was being followed, if the tense set of his shoulders and the hurried pace he set were any indication. 

He lost sight of Junhui for a second as the other slipped out the front door of the building, at the same time that Minghao was forced to stop to let a group of loudly chattering sorority girls stride past him.  Cursing under his breath, he pushed his way out the door and stared around the quad wildly, disappointment curling in his stomach for a second when he couldn’t find the other, before he saw the orange backpack disappearing around the corner of the building.

“Sorry, ‘scuse me, sorry,” Minghao muttered as he hurried along the path, practically pushing people out of the way in his haste.  He couldn’t lose Junhui, not if he wanted answers.

As he rounded the corner, he saw Junhui glance over his shoulder once, catch sight of him, and start running. 

“Are you _serious_?” Minghao hissed.  Even as he said it he started to run as well, ignoring the discomfort of his backpack slapping against his spine and the looks he was getting as he wove through the crowds of students, wind pushing his hair away from his face. 

He’d give it to Wen Junhui, the guy was pretty fast.  Even at the distance between them Minghao could see his legs moving fluidly, arms pumping and head down as he maintained a fast pace that had the two of them shooting through campus.  Unfortunately for him, Minghao had spent the last six years living with both Jihoon and Seokmin.  Being fast was necessary to survive. 

He was gaining on the other, having halved the distance between them as they left the main hub of campus and he saw Junhui’s goal – a tiny parking lot right on the outskirts, and in it an all-too-familiar black motorcycle.

“Are you _fucking_ _serious_?” he repeated, this time yelling it so that he _knew_ the other could hear him.  He didn’t get a response, and if anything Junhui seemed to move a bit faster, all but vaulting onto the motorcycle as he reached it.  His hands fumbled with the lock on the side of the bike as he detattched the helmet hanging there, he jammed it on his head –

And that was as far as he got, since Minghao barreled into the bike the next second, both hands wrapping around the handlebars and placing himself firmly in front of the tire.

“Don’t you- _ha_ \- Don’t you dare,” he panted, doing his best to glare at Junhui through the dark visor.  He couldn’t see even a hint of the man’s facial features through the dark tint, but the other had gone awfully still, frozen with hands still poised on either side of the helmet. 

“You better not try to ride off again,” Minghao said, voice growing steadier as he caught his breath.  “I mean, at this point it’d be rude to hit me a _third_ time.”

“Second.”

Minghao paused, doing his best to pretend that the muffled voice coming from the figure in front of him didn’t send a jolt though his system.  It was the same voice that he’d been mulling over all week, trying to twist and interpret the few words they’d exchanged into some sort of explanation.  “Huh?”

Slowly, the hands moved, lifting upwards and carrying the helmet with them to reveal chin, lips, nose, and then eyes and Minghao suddenly realized that _oh,_ their faces were rather close together like this, weren’t they?  He instantly bit down on his tongue to keep himself from saying something stupid – he’d already embarrassed himself enough in front of Wen Junhui.

Wen Junhui was talking, and it took Minghao a second to bring himself back to reality long enough to hear the words being said.  “Second time.  I’ve only hit you once.  And I _did_ apologize.”  The last sentence was said in a tone so whiney Minghao almost couldn’t believe it was real.

Anger flared up as he tightened his grip on the handlebars, glowering in a way that would have made Jihoon proud.  “Would you give it up already?  I know something happened, alright?  So drop the fucking act, Wen Junhui.”

“You give it up, Xu Minghao,” the other mocked, but the tone didn’t match the expression on his face.  Perhaps it would have been convincing from a greater distance, but Minghao was _very_ close, and he could see how Jun’s eyes didn’t quite meet his own, instead fixed somewhere on his forehead. 

 And maybe it was that little crack in the façade, that tiny hint that Minghao wasn’t wrong about all of this, that made him throw caution to the wind.  “I know, okay?”

Junhui’s expression didn’t change.  “Know what?”

“About…” Minghao stumbled over the words for a second, the knowledge that if he _was_ wrong this was about to get mighty embarrassing making itself known.  “About everything, okay?  The whole… other stuff in the world.  In our world.  I live with a bunch of psychics, my best friend is a dead guy who walks around like he’s alive, I’ve met ghosts and witches and exorcists and…and I _know_ , alright?”

For several long seconds – _one, two, three…_ – the other’s face remained completely impassive.  Minghao was just starting to think that he’d made a huge mistake, that the other was _definitely_ convinced he was crazy, when suddenly Junhui blinked.  At once the stone-cold expression was gone, and Minghao had to physically stop himself from gaping at the sudden openness of the other’s face.

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” Junhui said, and now everything had changed, from his voice to the way he was sitting on the bike.  All traces of stubborn aggression were gone, replaced with a dark-haired boy hunched over and chewing his lower lip in embarrassment.  He looked exactly how he had when Minghao had seen his lab grade, and if it hadn’t been for that earlier crack Minghao might not have believed he was still talking to the same Wen Junhui that had been haunting his thoughts all week. 

Minghao scowled, annoyance bubbling up at his own confusion.  “The hell do you mean you’re ‘ _not supposed to’_?”

“I _mean_ it’s supposed to be a secret.  A family secret.”  The other boy blinked, cheeks immediately flushing dark at his own words.  “Wait, no, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

 _Who the fuck are you and what the hell have you done with smooth-talking asshole Wen Junhui?_   But even as he thought it, Minghao vaguely remembered that Junhui hadn’t been quite so smooth-talking at first.  When Minghao had first woken up after being hit Junhui had been completely babbling, and it was only after he’d started questioning the other boy that the cool veneer had snapped into place.

Encouraged by the realization – and by the confirmation that there was, in fact, something fishy going on – Minghao leaned forward a little bit more, barely noticing how the other’s eyes widened as he leaned back in response.  “I won’t tell,” Minghao said, attempting to make his voice as pleading as possible.  “I just… I just _really_ need to know what happened, man.  I feel like I’m going crazy.  Even most of my housemates don’t believe me, and they’re psychics.  Usually they’ll believe anything.”

Minghao could see the hesitation in the other’s face, the way he was still chewing on his bottom lip as his gaze flicked between Minghao’s eyes, his own lap, and Minghao’s fingers still wrapped around the handles of the motorcycle. 

“Can we…go somewhere, maybe?” Junhui finally said, glancing over his shoulder – at what, Minghao wasn’t sure.  The parking lot was right on the edge of campus, and near deserted.  “I really don’t want anyone to overhear.” 

“Sure.”  Minghao probably would have agreed to anything at that moment if it meant that Junhui would finally answer his questions.  “Uh…where do you want to go?” 

He was expecting a normal answer, like ‘the library’ or ‘a coffee shop’ or even ‘my place’.  Instead, Junhui glanced over at the forest to the left of the parking lot, then back at Minghao with a hopeful light in his eyes.

Minghao stared at him.  “Are you fucking serious?” he deadpanned, then waved a hand at the kicked puppy look on the other’s face.  “Never mind, it’s…sure.  I’ll go into the woods by myself with the guy who’s killed me before.”

“ _Almost_ killed you,” Junhui muttered petulantly, finally swinging his leg back over to stand up from the motorcycle.  “And it was an accident, _and_ I fixed it, so you can’t hold it against me.” 

“Oh yes I can.  I’m fantastic at holding a grudge.  I could win the grudge Olympics.”  Minghao waited until the other boy had locked the helmet back onto the bike, until he was _entirely_ certain the other wouldn’t try to bolt again, before he finally loosened his grip on the handlebars.  His knuckles had gone white and he hadn’t even noticed.  “For real, though.  The woods?”

Junhui at least had the grace to look somewhat embarrassed.  “No one will hear us there.  I really, _really_ can’t stress how much this is supposed to be a secret.”

 _A secret between you, me, and literally hundreds of trees_ , Minghao thought, but didn’t say.  He’d keep his own quirk of regularly conversing with forests quiet for now.  Instead, he followed after the taller boy as Junhui lead the way towards the woods. 

Minghao could hear the trees whispering as soon as they stepped from asphalt to grass.  Apparently gossip traveled fast among plant life, especially when it was gossip about the only person (that Minghao knew of, anyways) who could communicate with them. 

_That’s the boy - !_

_Oooh, and the one who -?_

_Together again, I see_.

 _Zip it_ , Minghao hissed under his breath, unable to stop himself.  Luckily Junhui was too far ahead to hear him, and seemed more interested in leading them deep enough into the forest that there was no chance of someone hearing them.  In fact, he seemed so intent on it that Minghao was half worried the other boy really was planning on killing him (again).  Not that he thought the other would succeed – Minghao was a lot stronger than his frame would suggest.  Really, he didn’t have anything to worry about.

Apparently his paranoia didn’t get the memo, since the second Junhui stopped in a small clearing and turned around Minghao found himself blurting out, “I know wushu.”

 _Brilliant, Minghao.  Just brilliant_. 

Luckily the other didn’t seem to clue in to the source of his outburst.  Junhui blinked, head tilting to the side as he replied, “Oh, cool.  Me too.”

Minghao nodded blankly.  “Cool.”

It was awkward.  It was _so_ awkward.  Junhui coughed a bit, then slung his backpack off his shoulders and set it down, and Minghao did the same, and it _continued_ to be awkward.  Really, how could Minghao have thought it would be anything else?  Maybe he’d been counting on the smooth-talking version of Wen Junhui, but now the taller boy looked just as awkward as he felt, clearing his throat and shuffling his feet on the forest floor.

“So, uh.  Explanation, right,” Junhui muttered, perhaps to himself, before looking back up at Minghao.  “I guess it started like…a thousand years ago?  Or something like that.” 

“You’re not a thousand years old,” Minghao said, folding his arms decisively.  “The oldest warlock I met was only three hundred, and he looked way older than you.”

“What?  I – no, not _me_.  Ancestors!” Junhui sputtered, hands flapping slightly, and _wow_ , how had Minghao ever believed the bad-boy act?  It was the motorcycle, he decided.  The motorcycle had fooled him.  “Like, a thousand years ago, there were two friends who gained the favor of an angel.” 

“How?”

“How what?”

“How did they gain the angel’s favor?”

Junhui blinked.  “I… I don’t actually know.  I think the angel just liked them, for some reason.”

“Probably sold the angel weed or something,” Minghao muttered under his breath.  Junhui gave him a Look that was ripped straight out of Jeonghan’s Expressions Of Disapproval, but Minghao could hear the trees tittering amusedly behind him so it couldn’t have been _that_ bad.

“ _Anyways_.  The two friends gained the favor of the angel, so they were each given a gift.  One was given the ability to manipulate space, and the other…time.”

Junhui was silent after that pronouncement, eyeing Minghao warily, as if he was expecting some sort of response.  So Minghao said, “Aren’t those the same thing?”

The taller boy huffed, folding his arms petulantly.  “No!  They’re…related.  Look, people think Time is linear, but actually – ”

Minghao held up a hand to cut him off.  “I swear if you say it’s like a boob, I will turn around and walk out of this forest.”

“I- What?”  Junhui stared in obvious bewilderment.  “How the heck is it like a boob?”

“Never mind,” Minghao sighed, bringing the hand back to pinch the bridge of his nose.  This whole thing was turning into more of a headache than he had expected.  Even the trees seemed a bit more agitated, whispering among themselves.  “Just something one of my dumbass roommates said.  But I live with psychics, remember?  Let’s just assume I’m fully aware of the nonlinear nature of time.”

“Oh.  Right.”  Junhui seemed to be the only one who was becoming more relaxed – his feet had stopped shuffling as much, anyways.  “I was actually gonna say, everyone experiences Time differently.  So for this person the angel gifted, and occasionally his uh…descendants, Time is like a sea of ribbons.  There’s ribbons everywhere, for everything that’s ever happened.”

Minghao blinked, then looked down, carefully examining the space around him.  He didn’t see any ribbons.  “Okay.”  Hey, at least it wasn’t a boob.

“And then sometimes – and not everyone can do this, it’s really hard since the ribbons aren’t actually real – some of the descendants have learned to interact with them.”  Now Junhui seemed wary again, eyeing Minghao with that same sheepish expression he’d been wearing back in lab. 

Minghao nodded slowly.  “So for instance, as a _completely_ random and hypothetical example, if you were a dumbass who was riding a motorcycle without headlights at night, and you hit an innocent bystander walking along the road…”

“It’s called Weaving,” Junhui said, voice sounding small.  “You just…pull the ribbon a little, back to where it was a few seconds before.  It’s _really_ difficult, actually – I’ve been practicing my whole life and I’m only up to two and a half seconds, max.  I think my great-grandmother or someone was able to do fifteen, but that’s the most I’ve heard of.” 

“I see.”  Minghao leaned back against an oak, ignoring its disconcerted muttering as he studied Wen Junhui, taking in this new information.  Junhui didn’t _look_ like someone who was able to manipulate time, that was for sure.  In Minghao’s opinion he looked more like a little kid who expected a scolding.  He was back to shuffling his feet, apparently fascinated with a leaf next to his sneaker as an alternative to looking at Minghao.  At this point, though, Minghao was prepared to believe him.  He seemed too embarrassed to be lying.  “So can everyone in your family do that?  The weaving thing?”

Junhui shook his head, still looking down at the leaf.  “It’s really rare.  Usually there aren’t more than one or two Weavers alive at a time.” 

“Got it.”  Minghao pushed off of the oak again and raised his arms above his head, stretching slightly.  “Well, that explains that, I guess.  Thanks.”

“Wha- that’s it?”  Junhui _finally_ looked back up at Minghao, brown eyes ( _still very pretty_ , his subconscious reminded him, which again, _not helpful_ ) wide with amazement.  “You believe me?”

Minghao shrugged.  “Sure, why not?  Like I said, I live with psychics, so I’ve seen some weird shit.”  He paused, then added, “For example, I can talk to trees.” 

If Junhui’s face had been surprised before, now he looked absolutely dumbstruck, mouth hanging open and eyes practically bugging out of his head.  “You _what_?”

Hmm.  Maybe there could have been a better way to reveal that. 

“I, uh…talk to trees,” Minghao repeated, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly.  “Not just trees, pretty much all plants.  I dunno how, I just understand them, and I can speak their language.”

“Oh.  That’s uh…”  Junhui was nodding rapidly, adam’s apple bobbing as he apparently swallowed a few times.  “Might need to process that a bit, but cool.  What are they saying right now?”

Minghao shrugged.  “Dunno.  I usually tune them out, because otherwise it’s like I’m constantly in my Philosophy 101 class.  Way too many opinions at once.” Redirecting his focus to the trees around them, he continued, “Right now they’re saying…”

_Unknown…_

_What is it?_

_It’s coming…_

Minghao felt his eyebrows furrow slightly.  “They’re saying that something’s coming.” 

Junhui’s eyes widened again.  “Something?  Like…like what kind of something?”

_Ghastly..._

_Monstrous…_

_It’s almost here…_

“I don’t know,” Minghao said slowly, feeling a definite unease starting to trickle down his spine.  “But I think maybe we should get out of - ”

He was interrupted by a growl.

Minghao had never had a dog.  Or a cat.  He’d been to the zoo in DC once, when they’d driven up for Chan’s fifth birthday because the kid had been obsessed with lions.  They’d spent almost twenty minutes in front of the lion enclosure while Chan begged the animals to roar.  They hadn’t, given that most of them had been asleep at the time, but one had snarled half-heartedly. 

This growl sounded a bit like that.  Only ten times as loud, and eleven times as bloodthirsty.

Minghao turned around just as the creature stepped into the clearing.

His first thought was that it _was_ a lion, and his second thought was _where the fuck did a lion come from_?  Then it occurred to him that most lions probably didn’t have glowing red eyes, front legs that ended in hooves instead of paws, or a tail that was definitely serpentine in nature whipping rapidly behind it.

The whole thing was also covered in a dripping red liquid that could only be blood, which really just added to the already-horrifying image.  The blood sizzled a bit as it hit the forest floor, and Minghao could hear the grass screaming as it was burned.

He pinched his arm, hard.  Nothing happened, so he safely ruled out that the situation was an exceedingly weird dream.  “You’re seeing this too, right?”

“Yeah.”  Junhui’s voice had gone very high-pitched.  “Yeah, definitely seeing this.  Um.  What is this, exactly?”

“No idea,” Minghao said, and then the thing pounced. 

It sailed towards Minghao, fangs bared and eyes flashing, and he just barely had enough time to brace himself for impact when the moment was suddenly repeating, the creature was launching itself again and this time Minghao felt Junhui’s hand on his elbow as the other yanked him out of the way. 

“Run!” Junhui shrieked, grip sliding down to Minghao’s wrist as he pulled him forward.  Minghao didn’t think twice about obeying, the two of them sprinting out of the clearing as the creature growled again, the thudding of heavy footsteps behind them clearly indicating that it was giving chase.

Minghao threw a quick glance over his shoulder.  “It’s too fast!”  The creature was gaining on them easily – how the _fuck_ was it running so fast with hooves like that?  “Split up and climb a tree!”  Yanking his wrist out of Junhui’s grasp and ignoring the other’s surprised yell, Minghao darted towards the nearest tree he could see with a low-hanging branch and grabbed on, swinging himself up easily and scrambling up the trunk until he was more than ten feet in the air.

He turned to look back down, to make sure Junhui had done the same, and saw that the other boy was struggling to haul himself onto the lowest branch of an oak, just as the creature caught up with them.

Minghao’s breath caught in his throat, fingers tightening their hold on bark as horror swept through him…

The creature ignored Junhui entirely.  It dashed straight to the foot of Minghao’s tree and snarled up at him, standing on its hind legs and snapping its teeth. 

 _The fuck_? 

The creature crouched, then launched itself up towards Minghao, hooves flailing as it came a foot short and dropped back to the ground.  Minghao looked around frantically, trying to find a higher branch to climb to as the creature jumped again, this time managing to stretch a bit closer, but there were no branches within reach.  The creature snarled, then jumped a third time, and Minghao could feel its hot breath against his skin as its fangs snapped merely an inch away from his shoes.

 _Holy fuck, I’m_ actually _gonna die this time_.

The thing landed and crouched again, ready to spring once more.  Then suddenly it froze, flaming red eyes going wide.  The entire thing shimmered like a heat wave, and then vanished into thin air, revealing a terrified-looking Junhui behind it with a knife in hand, still outstretched as if he had just stabbed it into something.

Say, a giant hoofed lion-snake something that clearly was no longer there.

For a second there was absolute silence, the space that had been filled with bloodthirsty growls up until that point now ominously quiet.  Minghao could feel his heart pounding against his ribs as adrenaline slowly trickled out of his body, the two boys staring at each other with what he was sure were probably identical expressions of _what the fuck just happened_?

As the quiet stretched on, Minghao managed to clear his throat slightly and nod towards the knife still clenched tightly in Junhui’s fist.  “You really that much of a bad boy, motorcycle-riding cliché that you just had that on you?”

Junhui’s face went gratifyingly pink as he quickly lowered the knife.  Minghao decided that it was probably safe to climb down – the trees didn’t seem to think anything else was coming, although they were still chattering like mad about the creature – and started to shimmy his way down the trunk. 

As he landed on the forest floor – there weren’t even traces of the blood the creature had been dripping – he could see Junhui staring down at the knife still in his hand.  A switchblade, probably, now that Minghao looked at it closer.  “Those are illegal, you know.”

Junhui’s face went even pinker.  “It’s not mine,” he mumbled.  “It’s my roommate’s.”

“Still illegal.”  Questions of switchblade carrying laws weren’t really the most important topic at hand, though.  Minghao looked back at where the creature had been just a few seconds before.  A definite absence of hell-beasts looked back at him.  “So, we can agree that happened, right?  That wasn’t a really weird joint hallucination?”

Junhui was nodding slowly in agreement before Minghao had even finished talking.  “Yeah, it happened.  Even though I’m still not exactly sure _what_ happened.”

“We got attacked by a giant hoofed lion that was dripping blood, it chased us, and then you stabbed it with a knife you supposedly don’t own and it just…vanished?”  Minghao waited as Junhui hesitated, then nodded in agreement.  He shrugged.  “Cool.  So that’s that then.” 

He pretended not to notice the other gaping at him.  “You take things… _really_ calmly.”

“Oh no, trust me, I’m screaming on the inside.”  Minghao had almost never been so grateful for his unerring ability to keep a poker face.  “But right now I’m more concerned with the fact that we left our backpacks back in that clearing, and I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be eaten by a hell-beast than lose my laptop.”

It took them about ten minutes to find the clearing again.  There had been a bit of arguing where Minghao said they had come from the left while Junhui insisted it had been the right.  Minghao was eventually forced to admit defeat when the trees whispered that Junhui was, in fact, correct.  He trailed after the other boy a little sulkily as they finally found their original spot again, backpacks luckily sitting unharmed on the forest floor. 

“Thank god, Jeonghan would have killed me,” Minghao sighed.  As he picked up his backpack, he glanced back over towards the side of the clearing where the creature had appeared – more importantly, at the little brown spots of grass he could see dotting the area.  The memory of the blades’ screams as they died made him shudder slightly.  So.  Definitely not a hallucination then.

“I’ll probably ask my roommates if they have any idea what that thing was.”  Minghao turned to look back at Junhui, who was looking down at the knife he was _still_ holding in his hand.

“Oh!”  The other glanced up quickly as he apparently realized that Minghao had been talking to him.  “Uh…yeah, I have someone I can ask too.  Should we maybe talk about it afterwards?  Like, tell each other what we found out?”

“Sounds good.  Here, I’ll give you my number.”  Minghao was holding out his hand before he could even think of any alternate interpretations of the words.  Luckily Junhui seemed unfazed, dropping his phone into Minghao’s upturned palm and watching with a blank face as he put his number in.  Minghao couldn’t help but smirk slightly to himself as he saved his name under _Guy I Killed_.  His smirk only grew at Junhui’s whine of protest when he handed the phone back and the other boy saw.

“Are you ever going to let that go?”

 “Absolutely not.”

Junhui pouted, crossing his arms petulantly, and Minghao reminded himself that he most certainly did _not_ find it adorable. 

“You’re not cute like that, you know.”

_Why.  The fuck.  Did he just say that._

Junhui’s face turned red again, but this time he seemed to retain some of the smooth-talking charm he’d had on display previously as he grinned winningly at Minghao.  “Not even a little?”

“Not even a little,” Minghao said, turning away and ignoring how the trees were laughing, as if they didn’t believe him either.

            

* * *

 

 

Junhui burst into his apartment, panting and slinging his backpack off onto the floor as he dashed towards the living room.  “Wonwoo!”

His roommate didn’t even look up as Junhui ran in, just barely managing to stop before he crashed into one of the room’s many piles of books.  Instead, the dark-haired witch kept his head bent over the worktable in the corner, where he was apparently putting together a pouch of herbs.  “Hello, Junhui,” he said, still not looking up.  “How was your day?  Oh, you want to say thank you for putting a charm on you that let me know if you were in danger?  No trouble at all, and you’re welcome for the knife too - ”

“Won _woo_ ,” Junhui whined, collapsing onto the couch and kicking his feet petulantly.  “I told you I don’t need protection, you didn’t have to make a knife _appear_ in my hand!”

“It is quite literally my job.  And clearly you _did_ need protection.”  Wonwoo reached out and grabbed one of the many jars lining the windowsill, carefully selecting a pinch of the herb inside.  “What happened, anyways?”

 Raising his head, Junhui pursed his lips slightly as he watched his best friend work.  “I was going to ask you about it, actually.  I’m not really sure.”

“Sounds interesting.”  Wonwoo replaced the jar and picked up the next one.  “Ask away.”

“So, I was in the woods with Minghao - ”

The jar was set down rapidly with a loud _click_ as Wonwoo finally turned around to face Junhui, who realized too late what he’d just said.

“Minghao?” Wonwoo echoed, eyes remaining seemingly impassive behind the thick lenses of his glasses, but Junhui could see the corner of the other’s lips starting to turn up in amusement.  “This is Xu Minghao from your orgo lab?”

Junhui groaned, dropping his head back down and burying it under a pillow.  “Yes.”

“Minghao with the red hair?  Minghao with the super cute pointy ears?  Minghao with the awesome sarcasm and ‘why won’t he notice me, Wonwoo, I think he likes his lab partner, woe is me Wonwoo – ’ ”

“Okay, okay, I get it!”  Junhui kicked his feet again, feeling his face burning bright red where it was still shoved beneath the pillow.  With any luck maybe he could suffocate and avoid further embarrassment.  “You’ve made your point, can we move on?”

“Not yet.  I’m remarkably curious as to _why_ you were alone in the woods with your crush.”

Suffocation couldn’t come soon enough.  Mumbling _it’s not a crush_ half-heartedly, Junhui squirmed uncomfortably on the couch.  Ah yes, he had… _neglected_ to tell Wonwoo about the little event that had happened last week.  “I may have… sort of… _hithimwithmymotercycle_.”          

Silence.  Junhui carefully removed the pillow and lifted his head again, only to see Wonwoo staring at him with a deadpan expression.  “Your life is remarkable,” his friend said, completely monotone.  “Almost Shakespearian in the levels of dramatic irony you reach on a daily basis.”  Wonwoo sighed, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose – a gesture Junhui was often on the receiving end of.  “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you used your Weaving to fix it.” 

“I had to,” Junhui said, sitting up with a groan.  “The crash was bad.  I think he might’ve almost died if I hadn’t fixed it.” 

“And so you were out in the woods with him…why?”

Hesitating again – this was the part that could _really_ get him in trouble – Junhui chewed slightly on his lower lip as he thought of the right words to say.  “He remembered it,” he finally admitted.  “He remembered both versions of the crash.  Turns out he’s not a normie – not sure what he actually is, though.  He talks to plants.”

Wonwoo tilted his head to the side, squinting confusedly.  “Like, as a hobby?”

“No, like he _actually_ communicates with them.  They warned us about the thing right before it showed up.”

“What thing?  No actually, we’ll get back to that in a second,” Wonwoo said, holding up a hand as Junhui opened his mouth to respond.  “So, he remembered the crash.  How exactly did you explain it away?”

“Ah, see…”  Junhui squirmed again, feeling chagrin wash though him at Wonwoo’s sharp, suspicious gaze.  He tried to offer his most winning smile, even though he knew his friend was pretty much immune.  “I sort of…told him about Weaving?”

Another silence, this one longer.  Then… “Okay.”

Junhui gaped up at the witch.  “Okay?  You’re not gonna…tell my family, or something?”

Wonwoo glared at him, folding his arms.  “I’m your protector, Junhui, not your babysitter, as much as you seem to think otherwise sometimes.  I’m only required to report things that I think pose a definite threat to the safety of you and your family.  At the moment I don’t see Xu Minghao as a threat to anything except your dignity – not that you had much of that in the first place.”

“Rude,” Junhui huffed, but he wasn’t about to push the issue.  If Wonwoo wasn’t going to report back to his family that Junhui had basically broken the biggest rule of all time, he wasn’t about to complain.  As his assigned protector – a supposedly ‘time-honored’ traditional partnership between the Wen and Jeon families – it was technically Wonwoo’s job to keep him ‘in line’.  Luckily, the fact that his protector was also his best friend meant that Junhui was generally able to do what he wanted, as long as he didn’t cause any _real_ trouble.

“So, the story thus far is: You were in the woods with Minghao because you hit him with your motorcycle, and you were telling him about Weaving.”  Finally moving from his spot leaning against the worktable, Wonwoo sank into the armchair opposite the couch, still eyeing Junhui sharply through his glasses.  “Now, what was that ‘thing’ you mentioned?”

Junhui hummed in response, bringing one hand up to his mouth to chew on his thumbnail – a nervous habit, one he was trying (and failing) to break.  “I honestly don’t know.  I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it before.  It looked like a giant lion, but with hooves and a tail like a snake’s.  Its eyes were glowing and it was covered in blood.” 

He could see Wonwoo’s eyebrows inching slowly up his forehead as he spoke, looking as if they were in danger of disappearing behind messy bangs.  “A lion with a snake tail?  Sounds almost like – ”

“The Chimera from Greek mythology, yeah,” Junhui agreed, nodding.  “But it was all wrong.  It only had the one head, not three, and it didn’t breathe fire or anything.  The Chimera isn’t even supposed to have hooves, either.  It was like someone barely remembered what the Chimera was and tried to recreate it.  The Chimera’s reject cousin.  Maybe its descendent?  Are there even any chimera still around?”

Wonwoo was shaking his head even before Junhui had finished talking.  “Absolutely not.  All those old monsters died off centuries ago.  There was only ever one Chimera, anyways, and it was killed.”  He was silent for a moment, apparently thinking, then shook his head.  “So.  This sort-of-Chimera attacked you two?  Did you see where it came from?”

Junhui explained how the trees had warned Minghao of something approaching before the creature had entered the clearing, then how it had chased them and cornered Minghao up a tree before Junhui stabbed it, the beast vanishing without a trace.

Hands folded in front of his mouth, Wonwoo listened carefully with furrowed brows.  “That makes absolutely no sense,” he said when Junhui finished.  “I’ve never heard of anything like it.  Nothing just _vanishes_ when it dies.  The knife I sent you isn’t even magical, or anything.  It’s just a regular knife.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way,” Junhui huffed, crossing his arms.  “Now Minghao thinks I’m some sort of knife-wielding, motorcycle-riding bad boy delinquent.  He said so himself.”  He was pretty sure the fact that Minghao had seen his failing grade in orgo lab hadn’t helped his image.

Wonwoo raised an eyebrow.  “Is that better or worse than an extremely dorky literature nerd who’s socially awkward and just so happens to ride a motorcycle?  Maybe bad boys are his type.”

“No, I’m pretty sure his type is freakishly tall, baseball-playing airheaded supermodels,” Junhui muttered, sounding petulant even to his own ears before clearing his throat slightly.  “But anyways, what do you think it could have been?  A demon, maybe?”

“Doubtful.  I’ve got wards all over this town, I’d know if someone was summoning demons.”  The casual way that Wonwoo said the words were a little unsettling, in Junhui’s humble opinion.  “Besides, it doesn’t _sound_ like a demon.  No demon would vanish because of a little prick.”            

“ _That’s what she said_ ,” he couldn’t help but whisper under his breath, then shrank back when Wonwoo gave him a withering look.

“ _Anyways_ , I have absolutely no idea what it could have been.  Maybe get a picture next time, if it happens again.”  With that, Wonwoo stood up, walking back to the worktable and the abandoned pouch of herbs.  “So what’s the situation with you and plant boy, now?”

“We said we’d meet up tomorrow to talk about what happened, and if either of us found anything out.”  Junhui bit his lip slightly, feeling his cheeks flush as he tapped his fingers nervously against the phone in his pocket.  “He gave me his number.”

“Did he now?”  Wonwoo sounded far too amused for his own good.

“He _did_ ,” Junhui insisted, pulling out his phone.  “I could text him right now, if I wanted to.  I could ask him out.”

Wonwoo snorted.  “You’re not gonna ask him out.”

“I could,” Junhui shot back, opening up his contacts and pulling up the newest one.  He stared at the words _Guy I Killed_ and thought about Xu Minghao, with his cute face and rude words and eyes shining with determination as he glared at Junhui…

He flopped back down onto the couch, groaning in defeat.

“Told you so,” Wonwoo said.  Bastard didn’t even have the decency to sound smug about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of plot stuff happening, let me know what you think~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter had two options, one of which was to have two short chapters, and the other being to have one slightly longer than usual chapter. I obviously picked that one, but what that means is that unlike usually when I upload, I have not started working on the chapter after this one. So it'll probably be a while before I upload again. 
> 
> Also apologies for the fact that I have no idea how to format texting.
> 
> Enjoy~

Minghao got a text from an unknown number at exactly two thirty-three in the afternoon the next day, while he was in his Plant Structure and Function class desperately trying to scribble down notes about vasculature.  As such, he ignored it for the time being, even going so far as to flip his phone face-down on the desk so that he wouldn’t get distracted. 

Not that it helped much.  Minghao wouldn’t have been surprised if he looked over his notes later and found out that they were more about Wen Junhui and lion hell-beasts than they were about xylem and phloem. 

Twenty-two minutes later class was dismissed, and Minghao’s phone was unlocked and in his hand the second he was out of the classroom.

                **_Unknown_**

                _hey, it’s junhui. did u still wanna meet up?_

_my roommate didn’t really know anything about the lion-thing :/_

Damn.  Minghao had been hoping Junhui’s source – his roommate apparently, maybe the one who supposedly owned the switchblade – would have some information, since his own roommates hadn’t been of any help.  Granted, most had been busy with clients for the majority of the night, so he’d only gotten to ask them during the five minutes between sessions.  Pretty much all of them had straight up admitted to having no ideas, while Seungkwan had asked if Minghao had gotten into some of Seungcheol’s weed.  At least Jihoon had offered to do some more research and get back to him, so that was something.

                                **_Me_**

_ugh, that sucks a dick.  my roommates didn’t know shit either_

Minghao hesitated for a moment, then continued typing.

**_Me_ **

_we should probably meet up anyways to talk about what happened_

_i usually get a coffee at the cafe in the bio building rn if u wanna join_

Shit, no, why had he said that, that sounded _way_ too much like a date, didn’t it?  Or was that a normal, non-date thing people did?  Minghao had no idea. 

_This is what you get for having no non-dead friends and never going on dates_ , a mental voice sounding a lot like Jeonghan scolded him.  He told it to shove a screwdriver up its metaphorical ass just as his phone buzzed again.

                **_Asshole Who Killed You_**

                s _ure, sounds good! maybe we should go somewhere to talk though after getting coffee_

_not sure how well the hell-beast convo would go down in the middle of a cafe_

****

**_Me_ **

_you do remember what happened last time we ‘went somewhere to talk’, right?_

****

**_Idiot Who Killed You_ **

_oh come on, what’s the chance of that happening again?_

_it'll be fine, i promise!_

“You know what, I bet we _will_ get attacked now, just because he said that,” Minghao muttered, rolling his eyes as he automatically weaved around a slow-walking group of people, stepping onto the crosswalk with the complete lack of fear or awareness that only college students crossing a road possess.  A bit ironic, given what had happened previously, but Minghao was nothing if not stubborn. 

**_Me_ **

_if I die again, I’m gonna come back as a ghost just to haunt the shit out of you_

 

                **_Idiot Who’s Gonna Get You Killed (Again)_**

                _i don’t think you’d be a very scary ghost_

 

**_Me_ **

_excuse the fuck out of you, i'd be terrifying_

The café was relatively crowded when Minghao stepped inside, given that it was a common time that classes let out and students would swarm the coffee bar in the hopes of downing enough caffeine to get them through their next mind-numbing lecture.  “Dirty chai, please,” Minghao said to the harried girl behind the counter, handing over his student ID as payment when she held out her hand. 

**_Idiot Who’s Gonna Get You Killed (Again)_ **

_come on, ghosts aren’t that scary_

Minghao was about to respond with an infuriated _have you ever SEEN a ghost??_ when he felt someone tap him on the shoulder and looked up to see the exact same infuriating Wen Junhui he’d been talking to smiling from right next to him.  The other boy somehow looked softer than during their previous encounters, dressed in a thin blue sweater rather than the customary leather jacket, and his hair was pushed upwards in a way that, in Minghao’s completely unbiased opinion, was just plain unfair.

So of course, Minghao did what any reasonable person would do when faced with someone they found horribly attractive and snapped, “Have you ever even _seen_ a ghost, asshole?”

_You’re such a charmer_ , the Jeonghan-like voice in his brain remarked drily.  _How on earth have you not gotten a boyfriend yet._

The shock and chagrin on Wen Junhui’s face was interrupted by the barista calling out Minghao’s order, and he quickly spun away from the other boy and went to grab his drink, feeling his own face practically flaming in embarrassment.  Maybe one day he would be able to be around Junhui without regretting a good seventy-five percent of the things that came out of his mouth, but it didn’t seem like that day would be anytime soon.

“I’ll grab us a table,” he muttered, not daring to face Junhui while his cheeks were probably still burning bright red.  The temptation to bang his head against a wall was strong, and the table surface was also looking very appealing as he sat down at one of the few empty ones in the café.

This was one of the few moments in his life that he really wished he had more friends, or at least some more normal friends, because it would have been convenient to pull out his phone, text a friend something along the lines of _hey I think I accidentally got myself into a semi-maybe-most-likely-not date with a very very attractive guy, how the fuck should I behave_ , and receive stellar advice in return. 

As if in response, his phone suddenly started buzzing frantically on the table, lighting up with message after message pouring in at breakneck speed.

                _Group: stop yoon jeonghan 2kforever (6)_

                **_sockman_**

                _!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

                _Y’ALL CHAN SAYS THAT MINGHAO IS ON A DATE AND NEEDS ADVICE_

 

                **_bitch perfect_**

                _WHAT_

                _WHAT THE FUCK_

                _MINGHAO HOW COULD YOU GO ON A DATE AND NOT TELL ME_

 

                ** _boobear_**

                _lmaooooo i’m calling bs no way could hao get a date_

                _no offence hao_

 

                ** _sockman_**

                _well tbh chan says it’s a sort-of date_

                _but still!!! advice!!!!!_

 

                ** _blazeit_**

                _suck his dick, kid_

 

                ** _bitch perfect_**

                _NO_

                _NO DICK SUCKING ON THE FIRST DATE_

                _unless he’s rich and looking for a sugar baby of course_

                _then suck all the dick u want hao_

 

                ** _hoon_**

                _every time i think maybe you two aren’t such horrible influences_

                _you immediately prove me wrong_

                _hao, just ignore all these fuckers and stop stressing_

 

**_Me_ **

_you all suck_

_except jihoon_

He immediately turned his phone on silent and placed it face-down on the table, knowing that there would be an influx of responses that he was _not_ willing to deal with at that moment.  His roommates would probably corner him the second he got home, but that was a problem for Future Minghao.

Present Time Minghao’s problem, instead, was the fact that Wen Junhui was walking over and sitting down right across from him, smiling at him over a cup of something that seemed to be more whipped cream than anything else.

“Is there even any coffee in that?” Minghao asked drily, taking a sip of his own espresso-laced tea and biting back a curse when it turned out to still be way too hot to drink.

“Of course there is!”  Junhui scooped up a dollop of whipped cream with a spoon and licked it off, the motion remarkably childlike and again, 100% _not_ adorable.  “And no, I haven’t.”

“Haven’t what?” Minghao echoed blankly, still reminding himself that there was nothing cute about someone getting excited over whipped cream.

“Seen a ghost.”  Junhui’s expression turned a bit sheepish as he stuck the spoon into his mouth again.  “Actually, besides my family and my roommate’s family, I haven’t really interacted with many, uh…people like us.”

Minghao raised an eyebrow.  “Seriously?”  He knew maybe his own experience of living with a bunch of psychics, and therefore the company they kept, probably wasn’t normal.  But even before he’d moved to the Maze, back when he’d lived with his aunt in China, the supernatural had managed to find him.  He would have figured that Junhui, coming from a family that supposedly had this intimate relationship with the more mystical side of the world, would have had way more experience. 

“Yeah, seriously.  But I mean it’s not like there’s really that many, right?”  The absolute naiveté with which he looked to Minghao for confirmation was almost mind-blowing, and Minghao shook his head slowly. 

“Dude, I can almost guarantee you that at least one out of every ten people you meet has _some_ connection to our side of the world.  I could probably point to at least three in this coffee shop.”

Junhui’s eyebrows shot up in amazement.  “Wait, really?  How can you tell?”       

“You get a sense for it.  It’s like being gay, I’m also able to recognize my fellow queers in public,” Minghao remarked drily.  He couldn’t help but notice how Junhui blinked and seemed to almost perk up a bit at that, and nope that was _definitely_ not something he was going to put any thought into, thank you very much.

“Show me then,” Junhui said, practically bouncing on his seat eagerly.  “Who else in here is like us?”        

Raising an eyebrow and ignoring the way his heart seemed to pick up its pace in his chest, Minghao replied, “Like us as in supernatural, or like us as in queer?”

_Moment of truth_. 

“Either one.”

Okay. 

So.  Wen Junhui was very likely into guys.  Again, not going to put any thought into that.

Clearing his throat slightly, Minghao turned in his seat to scan the café.  It had cleared out a bit since they first came in, so there was only about a dozen people left, including the students working behind the counter.  Three might have been a bit high of a number, to be honest, but damn if Minghao wasn’t going to try.  “So first off, girl in the corner there?” he murmured, automatically lowering his voice as he jerked his head towards the table at the very far side of the room, where a girl with short black hair was bent over a thick textbook.  “Almost certain she’s a vampire.”

“For real?”  He wasn’t looking at Junhui, but he could hear the amazement in the other’s voice.  “How can you tell?”

“Dude, look at what she’s wearing.  It’s almost ninety degrees out and she’s in long sleeves and jeans with a huge sunhat.  _And_ a parasol sitting next to her.  Not to mention she’s pale as hell – I’d bet she hasn’t fed in a while.” 

“So vampires really do die in the sun?”  

Jeeze, Junhui hadn’t been kidding when he said he hadn’t met many other supernaturals.  “No, they don’t.  That’s a myth.  They just get hella sunburned.”  Minghao looked away from the girl and went back to scanning the rest of the room.  “Okay, number two.  Kid behind the counter, the one with the dark hair.”  This may have been cheating given that he actually sort of knew the guy – it was the boy in his year on his dance team, the one who he’d noticed staring at Soonyoung’s empty seat a little too long.  Jungkook, he was pretty sure his name was.  “I don’t actually know what he is, but I’d be willing to bet he’s something.  Maybe a witch, or a sighted human.”  As if on cue, the guy looked up and waved at Minghao, who waved back. 

“You know him?” Junhui said, then groaned when Minghao shrugged in acquiescence.  “No fair, that’s against the rules!”

“What rules?” Minghao replied, although he couldn’t quite help the amused smile he felt pulling at his lips.  “And then last one…” He scanned the room one last time, then nodded towards someone in the back with silver hair and a nose ring.  “There.  Totally gay.”

“I meant three of _either_ , not combining the two.  I could have guessed that last one myself,” Junhui complained, but he was smiling at the same time so Minghao figured he wasn’t actually annoyed.  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about, though,” the other boy continued, twirling his spoon in the whipped cream drink again and taking another bite.  “So there really are people like us all over?”

“Well I wasn’t lying, if that’s what you thought.”  Minghao tilted his head to the side.  “You really never knew?”

“I really didn’t.  I guess you could say I was kind of sheltered growing up,” Junhui said.  His cheeks had gone pink again, much like they had multiple times the day before, so Minghao figured the other boy was somewhat embarrassed about the fact.  “It wasn’t always like that, but once my parents figured out I could Weave, well…  I guess if the super special family superpower shows up once every hundred years or so, you’ve got to protect the person who is lucky enough to have it.”

He didn’t sound like he felt very lucky.

Minghao took another sip of his chai, tentatively this time so that he didn’t burn his tongue off and look like an idiot again.  “Did you grow up in China too?  I’ve heard you cursing in lab before.”  The thought vaguely occurred to him that they hadn’t even touched the topic they’d claimed to be meeting up for, that they were just playing stupid games and talking about themselves, but he ignored it.

_Sounds like a date_ , the Jeonghan-like voice whispered in his head.  Minghao ignored that too.

Junhui was nodding, smile becoming even more sheepish, if possible.  “Yeah, I’ve lived in Shenzhen my whole life.  I only moved here for college three years ago.”

“How’d you convince your family to let you come to America, if they’re so protective?” Minghao asked.  Again, he was struck by how different their two stories were.  His aunt had been more than willing to let teenaged Minghao go live with her best friend’s nephew halfway across the world.  But she’d always been like that raising him – he’d pretty much had free reign from a young age. 

“It wasn’t easy,” Junhui admitted.  “Mostly I just spent all of high school annoying them into it, and they only let me go because Wonwoo – my roommate – came with me.  He’s my protector, technically,” he added with a giggle, and great, now Minghao was back to reminding himself exactly how not-adorable that was.  “So he’s supposed to keep me safe.  But actually, he lets me get away with a lot more than my family ever would.”

Minghao hummed in acknowledgement, raising an eyebrow.  “Like riding a giant death trap phallic compensation everywhere?  Doesn’t seem very safe if you ask me.”

The pout on the other’s face was almost immediate, and Minghao actually had to physically bite his tongue this time to keep himself from cooing – which really, what the fuck?  “Would you stop calling it that?” Junhui whined, spoon stabbing moodily at the half-melted whipped cream in his cup.  “But yes.  My parents had given me some money to get a car while I was here, so I just…got a motorcycle instead.”

Wen Junhui was confusing, Minghao decided.  There was the leather-jacket wearing, smooth-talking version who’d apparently lied to his parents about getting a motorcycle, but there was also the soft sweater wearing, giggling boy slurping whipped cream in front of him.  All wrapped up in one ( _extremely attractive_ ) person. 

Maybe that’s why Minghao felt so weird around him.  Maybe it was whiplash. 

“What about you?”

Minghao blinked.  “Huh?”

Junhui was staring at him expectantly with wide eyes.  “You asked if I grew up in China ‘too’.  So you grew up there also?”

“Oh.  Yeah.”  Minghao took another gulp of his drink to keep himself from wondering _why the fuck does Wen Junhui want to know about me_?  It didn’t help much.  “I lived with my aunt in Anshan until I was fourteen.  That’s when I came here and moved in with my roommates.”

If anything, Junhui’s eyes went even wider.  “You moved here when you were _fourteen_?  By yourself?  How come?”

“I wanted to see more of the world.  Of _our_ world, not the normal world.”  Being a child who talked to plants hadn’t given Minghao many friends as a kid.  By the time he was fourteen, he was ready to find people who were more like him, who he could be completely honest around.  “My aunt’s a normie, but her best friend is psychic – she’s Seungcheol’s aunt, actually.  So she told us about the Maze, and I moved over here.” 

“Wow.”  Minghao felt himself practically squirm at the look of admiration Junhui was gazing at him with.  “That’s really impressive, actually.  So you’ve been here for…five years?  Are you a freshman? What’s your major?”

“Six,” he corrected.  “Sophomore, and plant science.  And you’re what, a junior?”  He waited for Junhui’s responding nod, then continued, “So like, don’t take this the wrong way, but how come you’re in orgo?  I’m pretty sure the class is almost all freshmen and sophomores.  You’re not a science major, right?”

The implied, _because you kind of suck at it_ was hopefully unnoticed.

Junhui’s face went one of the brightest pinks Minghao had seen thus far.  He ducked his head, hand coming up to rub the back of his neck.  “Ah, no, I’m a literature major.”  And okay, chalk that up as another point in Ways Wen Junhui is Confusing.  Literature definitely would not have been his first guess.  “I accidentally let my science gen ed go for too long, and I really wanted to get it done this semester so I have time for advanced literature electives next year.  And then general chemistry didn’t fit into my schedule, and I thought I could handle orgo, but…”  He trailed off, the memory of the lab grade they’d both seen floating over the table.

Minghao thought of his own B+ in the class, and barely even realized that he’d opened his mouth when he heard his voice saying, “I could tutor you.”

He could hear the mental Jeonghan voice cheering him for saying that, which didn’t necessarily mean it had been a good idea.

Maybe he shouldn’t have offered.  Clearly being around Wen Junhui was bad for his health – every other time he’d been one-on-one with the guy he’d almost died.  Not to mention there was that weird thing where he kept saying things without thinking about them first.  Yes, he should definitely take it back.

Opening his mouth, Minghao was about to deflect his own words with some bullshit excuse, like _actually I’m not that good either_ , or _you know, only if you actually want to_ , or _actually I’m not free at all anytime from now until the end of the semester_.  But then he saw the look of absolute awe-filled gratitude Wen Junhui was sending him, and the words died in his throat.  “Seriously?” Junhui asked, and what right did he have to sound that excited about _tutoring_ , for fuck’s sake?  “You’d actually do that?  I would owe you like, so much if you did.”

“You already owe me,” Minghao managed to say, the words sounding slightly strangled even to his own ears.  “You killed me, remember?”

“Yeah, but then I saved you from the hell-beast, so I figured we were even on that.”  Junhui leaned forward across the table, and Minghao bit back a curse at the proximity.  “For real though, you’ll tutor me?”

_Say no, say no, say no_ …

“Yeah, of course.”

_Weak_ , the Jeonghan voice cackled, and Minghao was really going to have to do something to get rid of that soon.  Maybe he needed an exorcism or something.  Call Jihoon’s brother again.

Junhui’s pretty brown eyes were shining with gratitude once more, and he opened his mouth, probably to thank Minghao again, when he was interrupted by a new voice that called, “Hey Minghao!  _We-e-elll,_ what do we have here?”

_Please, please no_.  As if this whole situation couldn’t get any more humiliating.  The Universe just seemed determined to embarrass Minghao to death, since first hitting him with a motorcycle and then attacking him with a hell-beast hadn’t worked. 

Soonyoung dropped into the empty chair to Minghao’s right, shit-eating grin stretched across his face, mischief practically radiating off him in waves.  Minghao shot his friend his best glare possible – if looks could kill, Soonyoung would have dropped dead on the spot.  Or…dropped _more_ dead, anyways.

“And who might you be?” Soonyoung chirruped, leaning towards Junhui, who leaned back with an expression that looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to be confused or scared.  It was an expression people commonly seemed to wear around Soonyoung, not that Soonyoung himself seemed to care.  “Minghao didn’t tell me he had a _date_!”

“It’s not a date,” Minghao snapped, noticing how Junhui immediately started sputtering in embarrassment at Soonyoung’s words.  Not that Minghao blamed him – he could practically feel all of his own internal organs shriveling up with abject humiliation.  “This is Junhui, the guy who - ”

Soonyoung snapped his fingers in recognition.  “The one who killed you, that’s right!  You told me about that last week.  Shame I missed it, would have been interesting to watch.”  His expression turned stern as he examined Junhui critically, sharp eyes flicking up and down.  “You know normally, killing someone isn’t the best way to get them to date you.” 

“Soonyoung, I _will_ staple your mouth shut again,” Minghao snarled.  He was pretty sure that Junhui’s face was going to reach the color of a tomato sometime soon. 

Soonyoung pouted.  “You know, that was really mean.  It does _hurt_.” 

“Boo hoo,” Minghao replied.  He knew Soonyoung was just playing it up for sympathy – he’d seen the guy staple his own hand before on purpose.  The product of boredom and dulled pain receptors, apparently.  “Anyways, where were you yesterday?  I almost died again – both of us did.”

“You did?”  Soonyoung didn’t respond to the question of where he was, predictably, instead looking between Junhui and Minghao with obvious curiosity.  “You should probably stop doing that before it becomes a habit.  What happened?”

Minghao told him an abbreviated version of the hell-beast story, grateful that his friend seemed to have gotten off of the ‘date’ topic, instead listening with wide eyes and a slowly dropping jaw.  “Whoaaa,” Soonyoung said when Minghao finished, shaking his head.  “That’s so weird.  That’s even weirder than me, and _I’m_ dead.”

Junhui looked somewhat shocked, so Minghao sighed and explained.  “Soonyoung’s dead.  No, we don’t know why he’s still around.  He’s not a ghost, or a zombie, or anything like that.  But he’s been dead for years.”

“Ah.”  Junhui still seemed confused, but he nodded slowly.  “I think you mentioned him yesterday.  Before the hell-beast thing.”     

Minghao nodded, then jerked his head towards Soonyoung.  “There we go then, he’s my third supernatural person.”

“I’m not supernatural,” Soonyoung argued as he stole a sip of Minghao’s almost-empty drink, the words familiar as they’d had this debate many times before.  “I’m just dead.” 

“The fact that you can even say the words ‘I’m just dead’ is a pretty good indication of _something_ supernatural,” Minghao replied drily, then added, “Anyways, did you want something, Soonyoung?” _You know, besides to humiliate me in front of a cute guy_.

“Oh yeah!”  Nodding, Soonyoung leaned forward and stuck his pinkie into the whipped-cream mess that was Junhui’s drink with his usual complete absence of boundaries, ignoring the other’s wide eyes as he licked the sweet mixture off his finger.  Minghao resisted the urge to bang his head against the table.  “It’s almost four, dude.  Jeonghwa called practice at four-thirty, remember?”

“Wait, it’s four?”  Junhui jumped up in a flurry of motion, while Minghao was still reeling internally over the fact that he’d apparently been sitting and talking to Wen Junhui for almost an hour and hadn’t even realized it.  And they hadn’t even brought up the hell-beast until Soonyoung arrived.

Junhui was still talking.  Babbling, more like.  “Shoot, I- I’m so sorry, I-  I forgot that I promised my roommate I’d go grocery shopping today, and he gets home at five.  He’s gonna kill me if I don’t, I- ”  Junhui paused where he was slinging his backpack over his shoulders, blinking at Minghao with hopeful eyes.  “Can I…can I text you about the tutoring thing?”

Minghao could practically feel Soonyoung vibrating with glee beside him.  “Yeah,” he replied, and hoped he sounded more casual about it than he felt.  Somehow, he doubted it. “Yeah, no problem.”

The smile Wen Junhui gave him was practically blinding, and this time there was no way Minghao could pretend his heart wasn’t doing fifteen backflips in ten seconds.  “Thanks, Minghao.  See you later!”  And then he was gone, practically running out of the café, and Minghao was left only with a gleefully snickering dead boy and his own very, very gay thoughts.

_You’re so fucked_ , the Jeonghan-voice cackled.  Minghao didn’t even have the strength to argue with it.

 

* * *

 

Someday Minghao was going to regret his constant leaving of issues to Future Minghao.  Because the problem was that Present Minghao always turned into Future Minghao eventually, and then he had to Deal With Things.

Things like, say, sneaking into a house full of psychics and avoiding every single one of them.  He’d already spent all of dance practice fending off Soonyoung’s waggling eyebrows and barely-veiled innuendos, so he was definitely _not_ in the mood for his housemates interrogating him as well.

Step one: opening the front door. 

Minghao hesitated on the porch, doing his best to subtly peek through the window and see if there was anyone lurking inside.  As far as he could tell, the lights were off, so hopefully everyone was dispersed elsewhere in the house.  Slowly, he pushed open the door, hearing it creek slightly as he stepped quietly into the darkness…

The lights flicked on, revealing all six of his housemates sitting at the foot of the stairs, staring at him.

_Failed step one_. 

For a second, there was silence between them.  Then Minghao dropped his bag and bolted.

“Grab him, Seok!” he heard someone – Seungkwan probably – shriek as Minghao sprinted past the staircase into the hallway.  They’d blocked his main way to his room, but he could take the path through the double bathrooms, as long as they didn’t think to trap him on the second floor landing. 

He took a hard left into the first bathroom, scrabbled with the door to the second one, and had just made it inside when a panel popped open in the wall, Chan slid out feet first and Minghao tripped over the seven-year-old’s legs. 

Crashing onto the tile floor, Minghao lay winded for a second before attempting to scramble up again, but a heavy weight landed on his back and knocked him back down to the floor with an _oof_. 

“Got him!” he heard Seokmin crow in his ear, and Minghao snarled in response, trying to throw his friend off without any success.

“Nice job, Chan,” he heard Jihoon say, and wow, _et tu Brute_?  Even Jihoon was in on this ambush? 

“Let me go!”   He thrashed even harder, feeling a twinge of satisfaction at Seokmin’s yelp as Minghao’s elbow caught him in the ribs. 

“Not until you tell us about your date,” Jeonghan sang, and Minghao wheezed under the extra weight as the older psychic sat down on Seokmin’s back.  “Now.  Spill.”

_How about you two stop trying to crush my internal organs first?_

He could taste defeat.  It tasted like the bathroom floor.

“It wasn’t a date,” he finally grumbled out, hearing how all of his roommates stopped chattering among themselves and turned to listen eagerly.  “We just met up for coffee.”  Whipped cream, in Junhui’s case, but still.

He heard Jeonghan snort.  “Hao, I know your boy experience is more pitiful than Seungcheol trying to get Jihoon’s attention – ” (There was a half-hearted _hey_ from Seungcheol that everyone ignored) “ – but for most people, that _is_ a date.”

“It wasn’t!  Can you _please_ get up?  I think Seokmin’s knee is lacerating my spleen.”

There was a whispered argument above him, then Jeonghan’s voice saying, “Okay, but if you run, just know that Chan will let his fire ant colony loose in your bed.”

“I will,” Chan confirmed solemnly.

The weights on his back disappeared, and Minghao pushed himself up with a groan.  His housemates were all clustered around him, faces lit up with identical curiosity. 

“So?” Seungkwan prompted from where he was perched on top of the toilet seat.  “Who’s the guy?”

“There is no guy,” Minghao responded automatically, examining his elbows for any new bruises.  “I just met up with someone from my orgo lab.  He’s kind of shit at chemistry, apparently, so I’m going to tutor him.”

He’d thought that would be the safest thing to say, the one that would incite the least suspicion.  Apparently he was wrong, if the way that Seungkwan squealed while Jeonghan and Seokmin exchanged delighted looks said anything.  Even Jihoon was snickering – only Chan seemed confused.

“Why would you tutor him?  You’re not that good at it either.” 

Minghao gaped at the kid, ignoring everyone else laughing around them, because _wow_ , using psychic abilities to see his grades?  New low.  “Excuse you, I’m not bad.”

“Don’t worry Chan.”  Seungcheol dropped a hand onto the kid’s head, ruffling the short brown hair affectionately as he shot Minghao a teasing grin.  “You’ll get it when you’re older.” 

“Tell us more!” Seungkwan cheered, bouncing up and down.  “What’s his name?  How’d you meet?  Why’d you go for coffee?  Is he hot?”

_Wen Junhui.  He hit me with his motorcycle.  We had to talk about the lion hell-beast that attacked us, except we never actually talked about it and just talked about ourselves.  Extremely and distressingly._

“I’m not telling you jack sh- ”

“Found his Insta!” Seokmin interrupted, holding up his phone.  He shrugged in response to Minghao’s stare of betrayal.  “You mentioned orgo lab, so it wasn’t hard to figure out based on previous intel.”

“I told you that in _confidence -_ ”

Jeonghan snatched the phone away, the others all coming to crowd around him.  “Let’s see who we have here… oh _wow_ , Hao, what a find!”

“Damn,” Seungcheol whistled, reaching over Jeonghan’s shoulder to tap the screen.  “And this dude went on a date with you, Hao?”

Minghao dropped his head into his hands.  “It wasn’t a date.”  No one listened to him.

“Hao’s handsome too, I think they’ll be cute together.”  Well at least the seven-year-old thought so.

“Eh.”  That was Seungkwan.  “I think this guy would look better blonde.” 

“There is a blonde pic, look.”

“Oh see, my point exactly.”

“Can I go now?”  Minghao raised his head to glare at them all.  “If you’re just going to stalk him is my presence really necessary?”

They exchanged a collective look, then Seungcheol nodded.  “Sure, go ahead.  We’re all gonna meet him eventually anyways.”

Minghao wasn’t sure if he liked or hated the certainty of that.

 

* * *

 

Minghao stared.  Wen Junhui was trying to kill him.  _Again_.

Junhui sighed when he said as much.  “I am _not_.  It’s perfectly safe, I promise.”

“All of my experiences thus far have told me otherwise.  You have no statistical evidence behind that statement.” 

Folding his arms, Junhui raised an eyebrow at him.  He was wearing his leather jacket again, which was only…somewhat distracting.  “Well how were _you_ thinking we were going to get to your house?”

“Walk.  You know, the natural way human beings have traveled for centuries.  Not take a fucking deathtrap - ”

“Phallic compensation, I _know_ , we’ve been over this.”  Junhui rolled his eyes as he stole the words from Minghao’s mouth, and hm, maybe he should be changing up his insults if he’d used the same one so many times.  “But it’s almost a hundred degrees out, and I don’t want to walk when we have a perfectly good ride right here.”

“Maybe you should wear something other than a leather jacket then, if it’s so hot,” Minghao mumbled half-heartedly, still eyeing the hulking black motorcycle with distrust.  It hulked back at him with what Minghao assumed was equal distrust.  “I am _not_ getting on the back of that thing.”

He was still of the opinion that they shouldn’t go to the Maze at all.  When they’d set up a time for their first ‘tutoring’ session – Monday after they were both done with classes, since Junhui insisted they needed to meet up before Wednesday because _I seriously barely understand what we did the last three weeks in lab Minghao, I’m 100% going to fail the pre-class quiz again_ – he’d been thinking they would meet up at the library, or maybe the café again.  But it turned out that like Minghao, Junhui preferred studying at home to studying in public. 

So Minghao had suggested they go to Junhui’s apartment.  Junhui had responded by forwarding a screenshot of the text he’d gotten from his roommate, who was apparently performing some sort of ritual Monday night and had forbidden Junhui from returning to the apartment before 10 o’clock or _so help me I will end you and tell your mother I have no idea what happened to your corpse._

When Minghao asked for explanation, Junhui admitted that his clumsiness had apparently ruined a few rituals previously. 

_(“I really was trying to be careful.  But there’s just all those candles everywhere, and they’re so small, and hey, did you know that carpets are really flammable?_ “)

So.  The Maze it was.

Minghao wasn’t exactly thrilled about it.  He had half a mind to warn Junhui about the type of reaction they were going to get the moment they stepped through the door.  His housemates had been teasing him all weekend – Seungcheol kept doing gross blowjob impressions while Seungkwan and Seokmin made kissy noises every time he reached for his phone.  They even got Chan in on it, the kid going around the house singing ‘ _Minghao and Junhui, sittin’ in a tree_ ’ to himself, volume increasing every time Minghao’s phone vibrated.

That was a weird thing.  Not his housemates teasing him, that was par for the course, but he and Junhui had been…talking.  Texting, more accurately.  It had started with Junhui asking which member of the Maze was the scariest, which led to Minghao telling the story of the time Jihoon had chased Seokmin down three flights of stairs with a guitar, then Junhui was telling him about one time when he’d accidentally sat on a pair of Wonwoo’s glasses, and the witch had retaliated by turning his hair pink, and then the next thing Minghao knew they’d been having a conversation for almost the whole weekend.

He kind of really wanted to ask someone if that was normal, but given that the choice of who to ask was between a group of psychics dead-set on torturing him, and a guy who was actually just straight-up dead, he kept the question to himself.

Of course, none of that would be relevant if he died before he even got to the Maze.

Junhui had started tapping his foot impatiently.  Really, Minghao thought people only did that in movies.  “Can we go, please?  I promise you won’t die, alright?”

It was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to win this argument.  Heaving a loud sigh, just to show how annoyed he was with the situation, Minghao grumbled out a “Fine.  But my statement from the other day about haunting the shit out of you still stands.”

The threat didn’t seem to do any good, as Junhui perked up immediately at Minghao’s acquiescence, flashing him a grin that Minghao might have described as charming, if he was weak to such things.  Which he obviously wasn’t.

Junhui had already practically jumped onto the bike, and before Minghao could even notice he’d unclipped a helmet and was tossing it in his direction.  “Let’s go, then!”

Just barely managing to catch the helmet, Minghao cast the bike one more distrustful glare before slowly approaching.  “What do I…do?”

The older boy had already put on his own helmet, and he flipped up the visor to grin at Minghao, who blinked at the sudden feeling of déjà vu, the sight both familiar and unfamiliar.  This smile was completely different than the one Wen Junhui had given him as he’d rode away on his motorcycle the first time they’d met.  That one had been sly and mocking and, Minghao was starting to realize the more time he spent around Junhui, part of a larger act.  This one was real. 

He realized that Junhui had been talking, and shook his head slightly to pull himself out of his (again, very gay) thoughts.  “Huh?”

“I said you just sit on the back and hold onto my waist.”

Oh.

Great.

That wasn’t going to increase the gay thoughts _at all._  

“Cool,” Minghao mumbled, shuffling forward and swinging a leg over the motorcycle, probably nowhere near as gracefully as Junhui had done it.  This, of course, put him in the immediate position of being _very_ close to the back side of Wen Junhui, so Minghao shoved the helmet onto his head to avoid thinking about it.  The world muffled instantly.

The bike roared to life beneath them, engine revving.  “Okay, ready?” he heard Junhui yell.  “Be sure to hold on and lean with the bike when it turns, and I won’t go too fast, promise!” 

And then they took off.

_If this were some sort of coming-of-age, romantic comedy movie_ , Minghao thought hazily, _this would be the really cinematic part where I end up having a great time and learn some implicit message about freedom or something like that._   Throwing up his arms, yelling into the wind all victorious and carefree, that sort of thing.

As it was, this was the part where Minghao reaffirmed that he was _fucking terrified_ of motorcycles. 

Contrary to his earlier expectation all gay thoughts were the last thing on his mind.  Instead his arms were wrapped around Junhui in a vice-like grip as he held on for dear life, eyes squeezed shut inside the helmet so that he couldn’t see the way they were rocketing through campus.  He could still feel the wind ripping past them, though, and the way his center of gravity shifted precariously every time they turned, always making him feel as if they were just about to fall the second before they straightened up again. 

“You’re a _fucking liar_!” he managed to yell, his voice getting whipped away by the wind the moment the words were out.   

“What are you talking about, this is slow!” he heard Junhui call back, but there was definitely a hint of laughter in the other’s tone.  In any other situation Minghao would have flipped him off, but as it was he had absolutely no intention of loosening his grip until they were fully stationary once more. 

“What road do I turn on again?” Junhui yelled then, and Minghao cursed his past self for not having provided direction beforehand. 

“The entrance is right past Cardamom Way, it’s got a giant bright green mailbox, you can’t miss it.  Or maybe you will if you don’t _slow down_!”

“Nah, I see it.”

One last breakneck turn later and the bike was slowing to a halt.  Still, Minghao didn’t dare crack open his eyes until the engine stopped rumbling beneath him, and he could hear Junhui chuckling against his front. 

“We’re here.  You can let go now, if you want.”

The slightly teasing tone had Minghao whipping his arms back immediately, yanking the helmet off his head to glare at Wen Junhui, who had apparently already removed his own helmet and was twisted around on the bike to grin at him. 

“Hey, I’m sorry if I went too fast,” he said then, tone dropping into one of genuine concern, and _damn him_ for making Minghao’s stomach fill up with fluttery insects when he was busy trying to be mad.  “I thought you’d like it.  Um…”  The other boy seemed to flounder for a second, then held up a hand with a sheepish grin.  “High five?”

Minghao stared.  “Why?”

Junhui didn’t drop his hand.  “For making it through your first motorcycle ride!”

A few more seconds of staring, and then Minghao sighed and smacked his own palm against Junhui’s.  “First and only,” he corrected, before getting off the bike with shaky legs and making his way towards the Maze door, Junhui giggling as he trailed after him.

Minghao had just reached for the doorknob, however, when the door itself swung open.  Actually, ‘swung’ was probably a bit of an exaggeration, as in actuality it opened about halfway and then stopped abruptly, Jeonghan’s face visible through the gap. 

“Hi Minghao, I was actually about to call you.”  The elder’s voice sounded remarkably clipped, matching the tense, extremely fake smile on his face.  “Did you bring company over?”

Junhui leaned out from behind Minghao with a hesitant smile.  “Um…hello!  I’m - ”

“Wen Junhui, in Minghao’s orgo lab, yes, you know you’re even cuter than your Instagram, though Seungkwan thinks you looked better blonde.”  Jeonghan barely paused after that pronouncement, ignoring the weird choking noise Junhui made as his eyes flicked back towards Minghao.  “You might not want to be here.”

Minghao stared back at him.  “I already don’t want to be here.  I suggested many other places to study, actually, but this was unfortunately the best option.”

“Is something wrong?” Junhui echoed behind him.

Jeonghan didn’t reply immediately, instead glancing behind himself and then back to the two of them.  “You’re just going to stay in your room, yes?  For how long?”

Was this a trick question?  “A couple hours?” Minghao suggested.  “We have to go over last week’s experiment and then study for the quiz.” 

Jeonghan slowly nodded, and the fact that the elder wasn’t seizing the opportunity to make a teasing or suggestive remark set off alarm bells in Minghao’s head.  “Okay, it should be done by then.”  The door swung open fully this time, and before Minghao could say anything Jeonghan had grabbed both of their wrists and was practically dragging them inside. 

“Hurry, hurry, get up to your room before it starts,” he hissed, pulling them past the first staircase towards the one that led to Minghao’s room.  Minghao was starting to get an idea of what was probably about to occur, but Junhui looked completely bewildered.

“Before what - ”

_CRASH_

“ ** _FUCK.  YOU._** ”

The three of them stopped halfway to the stairs, and Minghao saw Jeonghan close his eyes in defeat.  “Too late.”

Jihoon came storming into the room with all the rage of a five-foot-four vengeful hurricane, Seungcheol stumbling after him.  “Jihoon, c’mon - ”

“NO, FUCK YOU!”  Jihoon spun around and shoved at Seungcheol’s chest, the older boy falling back a few steps.  “Don’t you _fucking_ talk to me!”

Someone with a greater sense of self-preservation probably would have walked away at that moment, but Minghao knew that Seungcheol had never had much self-preservation when it came to Jihoon.  “Hoonie, please - ”

“Don’t _fucking_ call me that!”  The hand that Seungcheol had been extending was slapped away.  “Don’t call me that, don’t try to touch me, don’t talk to me, don’t you dare come _near_ me!  Just go get high off your ass and leave me the fuck alone!” 

That one was a low blow, and they all knew it.  Minghao heard Jeonghan inhale sharply next to him, and saw the hurt well up in Seungcheol’s eyes.  Jihoon must have seen it too, because his face twisted up into a grimace momentarily, then reformed into its previous fury.  “Stop _looking_ at me like that, this is your fucking fault!” 

He whirled back around and seized the nearest object – an ornamental vase on a table – and hurled it at a wall.  It shattered into pieces, and the noise seemed to rouse the three still standing on the stairs.

“Go, go, get out of here, I’ll handle this,” Jeonghan hissed, shoving at the other two’s backs.  Minghao could see that Junhui was still staring in shock at the pieces of the vase on the ground, so without thinking he seized the other’s wrist and started pulling him up the stairs. 

“C’mon, stop staring and move,” he muttered.  That seemed to do the trick, as Junhui stopped being dead weight and actually followed him up the two flights of stairs, despite the second crash that echoed behind them. 

As soon as they were in his room, Minghao swung the door shut behind him with a sigh, taking a second to lean against it as if the chaos from outside might break in at any second.  “Sorry about that,” he said, glancing over at Junhui, who was standing in the middle of the space with an understandably shell-shocked expression.  “They only do that every couple months or so.  Seems like today’s the lucky day.”

Junhui still looked stunned.  “What happened between them?”

“Oh.”  Minghao pushed off the door and moved past the other boy to sit on his bed, slinging his backpack onto the ground and opening it up.  “They’re in love.”

That didn’t seem to help Junhui’s confusion at all.  “Really?  Um…not to be rude, but are you sure?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.  They’re not together or anything, but they’re definitely in love.”  Glancing up at Junhui, Minghao could feel his lips stretching into an annoyed grimace.  “In all seriousness, we joke about it a lot in the Maze, but it’s actually pretty complicated and sad.”

Slowly, Junhui dropped his own bag and walked over to sink down on the floor next to the bed, looking up at Minghao.  “What happened?” he repeated, the tone a bit softer this time.

Minghao paused, trying to decide where to begin.  “So, the thing you have to understand is, Seungcheol is probably the most powerful psychic in the last century, or something like that.  The kind of psychic where he would have gotten locked up if he’d been born fifty years ago.  He’s constantly front row to everything going on in the Universe for all of time.  Like that scene in Clockwork Orange where they hold the guy’s eyes open and make him watch all kinds of gruesome shit.”

Junhui’s eyes were wide with awe.  “That doesn’t sound very fun.”

The laugh Minghao gave echoed hollowly around the room.  “It’s not.  It basically drove him insane when he was a teenager, until he started self-medicating to keep himself impaired at all times.  It was with alcohol for a while, which was…”  Minghao paused, shuddering a bit at the memory.  “Not pleasant.  It took Jeonghan a while to ween him off of that.  Now it’s mostly weed, but sometimes stronger stuff.  He’s basically high twenty-four by seven so that he can’t see what’s going on everywhere, because his brain is busy being a pile of mush.”

“Oh.”  Junhui tilted his head a bit, clearly trying to piece together the full story.  “So that’s why Jihoon won’t date him?”

Minghao laughed again, a bit louder and a bit more bitter this time, even to his own ears.  “Oh no, see there’s the complicated part.  It’s not Jihoon who doesn’t want them to date.  It’s Seungcheol.”

The other’s eyes widened again.  “Huh?  But it seemed like…”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?” Minghao nodded.  “From the outside it looks like Jihoon’s the asshole and Seungcheol the poor pining idiot, but actually they’re both assholes who are pining for each other.” 

He could see that Junhui was still confused, so he continued, “When Jihoon first moved to the Maze a few years ago, they flirted for a while and eventually fell into bed.”  Minghao remembered it very clearly – he and the others had all been forced to endure the weird sexual tension for the first couple of months any time Jihoon and Seungcheol were in the same room.  “But they both caught feelings, apparently.  So Jihoon confessed, and Seungcheol immediately started saying that Jihoon shouldn’t love him, that he deserved a lot better than an insane drugged-up burnout, and all kinds of self-deprecating shit.”

Junhui whistled lowly.  “I’m going to guess Jihoon didn’t like that.”

“Are you kidding?  He went ballistic.  Literally the _last_ thing you should ever do is tell Jihoon not to do something.  But the problem is that they’re still in love, so they can’t let each other go.  They just keep pretending that they’re fuckbuddies who don’t actually like each other, until Jihoon inevitably gets too close; then Seungcheol pushes him away, Jihoon blows up at him, and you get the scene from today.  Repeat ad nauseum.”

“Damn,” Junhui mumbled.  He’d somehow ended up leaning against the side of the bed while Minghao hadn’t been paying attention.  “And how long have they been doing this?”

“About three years.”

“That’s awful.”  There was quiet for a moment, so Minghao peered over the edge of the bed to see that Junhui was chewing on his thumbnail, apparently lost in thought.  “Why don’t they just call off the whole thing entirely?  One of them move out?  It seems like it would be a lot less painful.”

Minghao paused for a moment, considering.  “Well.  I’ve never experienced it myself, but I’ve heard love can make you do some pretty stupid things.”

“Oh.”  Junhui’s voice was soft, and Minghao chanced another glance at the boy to see that he was looking back up at Minghao, eyes just as soft as his voice.

One, two seconds of eye contact, and then Minghao found himself quickly looking away, clearing his throat and willing down the blush that he could feel rising to his cheeks.  “So.  Um.  Chemistry.  We have… you know, _orgo_.  Orgo work to do.”

“Right.”  Was it Minghao’s imagination, or did Junhui sound just as disoriented as himself?  “Right, orgo.  That’s.  A thing.” 

Probably just wishful thinking.  Pushing all thoughts other than lab work out of his mind, Minghao opened up his notebook and leaned forward.  “Okay.  Which part don’t you understand?”

“All of it.”

“…great.”

It was gonna be a long couple of hours.

 

* * *

               

Minghao was leaving campus at almost eleven at night when he heard the growl.

It was three days after his and Junhui’s study session, and he was on his own.  He’d decided to stay in the dance studio and practice on his own after everyone else left, and Soonyoung had hung around for a couple hours with him before vanishing.  He had just left the studio, shivering a bit as the cool evening air hit his sweat-soaked skin, and was crossing a parking lot when he heard a growl.

Stopping dead in his tracks, he took a moment to mentally categorize this growl.  It didn’t actually sound much like a growl, more like a low-pitched screeching noise with just enough rumble to perhaps be growl-like upon first glance.  It didn’t sound like the lion hell-beast, but it didn’t sound like anything else Minghao had ever heard either. 

He turned around, and immediately regretted it.

Beneath a streetlight across the parking lot, there was a horse.  At least, he assumed it had to be a horse, because it had a horse’s head, but the mane-adorned neck flowed unnaturally into an almost humanoid body, up on two legs and balanced precariously on its hind hooves.  Its front legs were very clearly actually arms, complete with muscular biceps, and they ended in two distinctly human hands, pink skin a striking contrast against the rest of the creature’s bay coloring.

It was, quite frankly, the most disturbing thing that Minghao had ever seen. 

“What the fuck,” he managed to say, then he turned and started to run.

Any hope that this new hell-beast might ignore him was lost as he heard an angry braying noise, then the distinctive sound of hooves against asphalt pounding after him.  Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he was relieved to see that this one was slower than the last, tottering unsteadily on its still rather horse-ish legs and hooves as it gave chase.  It probably wouldn’t be able to catch him at his current speed, but he couldn’t just run from it forever, he’d have to slow down eventually…

Taking a hard left onto a path between two buildings (and seriously, why the _fuck_ was campus this deserted?  Like, he understood that it was late, but still.) Minghao pulled out his phone and opened up his conversation with Junhui, hitting the call button.

It rang twice.  “ _Hello?  Minghao?_ ”

“There’s a fucking horse with hands!” he yelled, not bothering with preamble.

“ _There’s…what?  Are you running?  Your voice sounds kind of - ”_

“Yes, I’m running!” He looked over his shoulder again, confirming that the hell-beast was in fact doggedly persuading him.  Or…horsedly?  “I’m running from the _fucking hell-beast that’s a fucking horse with hands_!”

He heard Junhui swear loudly on the other end of the line, then the distinct sound of a familiar motorcycle starting up.  “ _Where are you?_ ”

“Running for my _fucking life_ between the engineering buildings.”

“ _Can you lead it to Lot G?  Behind the baseball field.”_

“I mean _yeah_ , but what exactly do you expect me to do with it once I get there?”

“ _I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out how to get rid of it!_ ”

“ _That’s_ your plan?”

“ _Do you have a better one?_ ”

Unfortunately, Minghao didn’t, so he just swore loudly as another angry neigh sounded from behind him, a bit closer than before.  “Fine!  Have it your way!”

He veered off to the right, abandoning his previous path towards the science quad and instead heading more towards the outskirts of campus.  He was starting to lose speed, though, and there was a dull ache beginning between his ribs that promised a cramp in the next minute.  “If you’re not there and I die I’m going to haunt you!  Again!”

“ _At this point I’m relatively certain you’re going to haunt me no matter what.  I’m almost there, okay?”_   He heard the engine on the other end of the line rev even louder than before. 

“How the fuck are you driving a motorcycle while on the phone?”

“ _I have headph-  Is that_ really _important right now?”_

Minghao glanced over his shoulder again, swearing even louder than before as he saw how much ground the hell-beast had gained.  “Fuck, why the _fuck_ is this happening?!”

He tore into the parking lot, skidding to a halt and letting out a shout of mixed frustration and exhaustion at its motorcycle-free state.  “Where the _fuck_ are you?”

“ _Almost there!”_

Another neigh, this one the loudest of all, and Minghao turned around just in time to duck the large pink hand that swiped at his head.

“Mother of _fuck_!”  His wushu training kicking in, Minghao swung his legs out at the hell-beast’s delicate looking ankles, letting out a hiss of triumph as he made contact and it careened to the floor.  Scrambling back to his feet, he turned and bolted for the nearest parked car.  Jumping onto the hood, he ignored the alarm going off as he climbed up onto the roof, just in time for the hell-beast to get back to its feet.  (Uh…hooves.)

Braying in obvious rage, the creature charged towards the SUV, hands flailing and reaching for Minghao’s shoes.  It obviously couldn’t climb up, and for half a second Minghao felt safe.  Then, apparently deciding to switch tactics, the creature neighed again and rammed its muscular shoulder into the side of the car, making the whole vehicle shake, and Minghao stumble atop it. 

“Fuck!”  Taking a second to steady himself, Minghao glanced over his shoulder, then jumped to the roof of the minivan parked in the next spot.

The creature didn’t seem deterred, circling around the first SUV to run full speed into the minivan.  Minghao stumbled again, almost losing his balance. 

“You are… _so_ fucking annoying!” he yelled down at the creature.  It neighed back at him.

A motorcycle roared, and then crashed directly into the hell-beast.

_That’s it_ , Minghao thought as he watched the creature go flying back almost ten feet, landing against the asphalt with a sickening thud.  _That’s it, it’s dead, it’ll disappear like that last one_.

A few feet away, Junhui pulled himself to his feet with a wince from where he’d fallen off the motorcycle on impact, pulling off his helmet and looking up at Minghao.  “You okay?”

Why the fuck did Minghao find that so attractive?

_Get you a man who will hit a horse-human hybrid with his motorcycle for you_. 

“I’m f-“ he started to say, and who really knew if he was going to say _fine_ or _fucked_ , because a low, angry neigh rumbled at them just then from about ten feet away.

The hell-beast was getting back to its feet.  Blood was dripping from several gashes in its body now, and it looked absolutely murderous, which is an extremely horrifying expression on a horse face.

“Oh wow,” Junhui said, and then whipped out his phone.

Minghao stared.  “What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

“Trying to take a picture, I- “ 

Whatever Junhui had been about to say was cut off with a yelp as he dove to the side, the hell-creature barreling past as it rammed the minivan once more.  This time Minghao really did almost fall over, and it was only with great difficulty that he managed to stay on his feet. 

“Why the fuck do they keep going after me?  Why can’t you get attacked by these hell-beasts for a change?” he yelled.

“Do you think _I_ know?” Junhui yelled back at him, still holding up his phone.  As if on cue, the flash went off, and the horse creature blinked rapidly before turning to face Junhui, bellowing in rage.  “Oops,” Junhui mumbled, and then dove out of the way again as the creature charged him.

“Oh for fuck’s…get up here!”  Kneeling down on the car roof, he held out a hand to Junhui, who quickly took it and scrambled up to join him on top of the van.  “So now what?”

Junhui bit his lip, wobbling dangerously as the hell-beast brayed and stalked towards the van again.  “I don’t know.  I was hoping it would disappear like the other one when I hit it.”

“Well I think it’s clear that didn’t work.  Don’t suppose you have a knife on you again?”  Junhui shook his head, and Minghao groaned, then started pushing up his sleeves as the creature geared up speed and started charging towards them.  “Whatever.  I’m gonna punch this ugly motherfucker right in his fucking - ”

A shiny, silver baseball bat swung through the air and slammed into the back of the creature’s head.  It froze, wavered, and then vanished, revealing someone very tall and clearly terrified behind where it had been.

Mingyu smiled shakily, gripping the baseball bat with white knuckles.  “Hi Minghao.  That’s my car you’re standing on.  And, uh… someone please tell me I’m wrong, but did that horse have hands?”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact this week's hell-best is inspired by a conversation my roommate and I had about how fucking disturbing it would be to see a horse with human hands. 
> 
> I didn't edit this chapter nearly as much as I should have so I apologize for any typos or general verbal ick.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well boy howdy it sure has been over a month. Life is absolutely crazy tbh. 
> 
> Like I said last chapter, since I combined two I didn't have a chapter prepared in advance, so this took me a while to write. I literally just finished a few hours ago and did some quick edits, so I apologize for any quality issues. 
> 
> Also I changed my username because I realized it was the same as my instagram and I cannot emphasize enough how much I Do Not Want people I know irl to find my fics.

If Wen Junhui was weird, Minghao decided, Wen Junhui’s roommate was even weirder.

For one thing, he hadn’t batted an eye at Junhui leading two strangers into their apartment much later than any acceptable visiting hour – one stranger extremely pissed off and grumpy, and the other shaking with delayed terror and continuing to mutter “but why did it have hands?”  Instead, he just looked up from the book he was reading, took in their collective state of distress, and said “I’ll make tea.  With whiskey.”

For another, he made the tea-and-whiskey by waving a hand in the general direction of the kitchen.  A piping hot kettle floated out immediately, followed by four mugs and a bottle of Jack Daniels that was already unscrewing itself.

“Oh,” Junhui mumbled as he toed off his shoes, not quite looking at the rest of them.  “Wonwoo’s a witch, by the way.”

That seemed to be the breaking point for poor Mingyu, who was staring with wide, horrified eyes at the kettle now pouring its contents into the four (still floating) mugs.  He didn’t even move to a chair, instead sinking slowly to the floor and leaning back against the wall with the air of someone who was about to pass out.  “A witch.”

Minghao, who had met witches before, just grabbed a floating mug and accepted the generous slosh of whiskey that the bottle added into it.  “Thanks.”  He took a sip, the combination burning both his tongue and throat at the same time, and eyed the dark-haired man who was sitting on the couch, book still open in his lap.  He would have guessed warlock, personally, if Junhui hadn’t told him previously what Wonwoo was.  Most witches were a lot less liberal with their magic.

“I tread the line, but witch is the classification I usually go by, seeing as no demonic entities were involved in my acquisition of powers,” Wonwoo replied drily, and it took Minghao a moment to realize he’d spoken his own thoughts out loud.  “You’re Xu Minghao, I assume?”

Hearing his name come from the other’s mouth sent a jolt through Minghao that he was pretty sure didn’t have anything to do with the whiskey.  If Junhui’s roommate knew his name, that meant the other had probably talked about him…

Nope, nope, quashing that train of thought immediately.  _He probably just mentioned you when he was asking about the first hell-beast_ , he reminded himself.  _You mentioned Junhui to your roommates too._

_Yeah, but that wasn’t by choice.  They’re psychics._

_Shut up and stop arguing with yourself._

“Yeah,” he said out loud.  “That’s me.”

“Talks to plants?”

“Yup.”

“Can someone please explain to me what is going on here?” Mingyu interrupted from where he was still on the floor, voice almost sounding like a whimper.  “The…the kettle is floating, and there was a horse with _hands_ …”

Minghao looked between Wonwoo, who was carefully mouthing the phrase ‘horse with hands’, and then at Junhui, who was staring at his cup of tea with an almost sulky expression, for some reason, and sighed.  Clearly the responsibility of introducing Mingyu to this new face of the world was going to fall squarely on his shoulders. 

Ugh.

“Mingyu, the world isn’t how you thought it was,” he started, trying to find words that got the point across but wouldn’t be too overwhelming.  “Magic is real, people aren’t always human, and there are monsters and other creatures as well.  You just killed a monster for us.”

Mingyu nodded slowly.  “Oh,” he said, then his face screwed up and he started to cry.  Minghao winced – okay, maybe he had been a bit too blunt.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he heard Wonwoo mutter as the book shut with a _snap_ , then the witch was getting to his feet and stalking towards the table in the corner of the room.  His fingers ran over the small vials lined up on the windowsill, before selecting one and pouring it into the mug that had floated obediently after him.  Walking back over to the still-sniffling Mingyu curled up on the floor, he all but shoved the mug into the other’s hands.  “Drink.”  It sounded more like an order than anything else, and Minghao was only slightly surprised when Mingyu’s hiccupping sobs subsided and he raised the mug to his lips with trembling hands.

“Look,” Wonwoo said, folding his arms as he frowned down at Mingyu.  “Look, uh… dude I don’t know and whose name was just said but I can’t remember because I wasn’t listening.  The world actually hasn’t changed at all.  Now you just know.  Knowing is better than living blind, so it’ll all work out, okay?  It’s overwhelming at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

Minghao didn’t think that was any better than what he’d said, but Mingyu sniffled a couple times more and then wiped his eyes, mumbling out an “Okay.” 

Wonwoo must have seen Minghao gaping at him, because he mouthed the words _calming potion_ in his direction.  Oh.

“Now,” Wonwoo said, turning away and going back to his original position on the couch, hands folded in front of his mouth in a pose that reminded Minghao of a mafia boss in old movies.  “Care to explain why exactly you two have brought a clearly non-sighted human into the apartment at – ” he paused to check the time, then shrugged.  “ – fuck o’clock in the morning, and how a horse with hands factors into all of this?”  He was speaking to the room in general, but was looking at Junhui, who still seemed remarkably pouty for some reason. 

Junhui huffed and folded his arms.  “Minghao said we couldn’t leave him.”

“We _couldn’t_!”  Honestly, what the fuck was Junhui thinking?  “He just killed the fucking hell-beast for us, we weren’t about to leave him without any explanation!”

“Minghao’s right,” Wonwoo cut in, shooting Junhui a disapproving glare, and the other boy shrank back in the chair where he was sitting, pout becoming more pronounced.  “That’s just basic manners.  Now, about this hell-beast – this is separate from the lion one?”

Minghao nodded, ignoring Mingyu’s confused intonation of _‘there was a lion one?’_.  “Yeah, this one was like a horse-man.  Cornered me on campus and chased us around for a while, didn’t die when Junhui hit it with his motorcycle - ”

“His kill rate seems remarkably low with that,” Wonwoo replied drily, and Minghao couldn’t help the snicker that escaped his lips while Junhui whined in protest. 

“Yeah, so then Mingyu hit it with his bat and it vanished.”

“I got a picture,” Junhui put in, pulling out his phone and tossing it to Wonwoo.  “Like you requested.”  Oh, so _that’s_ why he had been trying to get a hell-beast snap. 

Wonwoo tapped the phone a few times, and okay, either Junhui didn’t have a passcode on his phone or Wonwoo knew it by heart.  Minghao suspected the latter, immediately despised it, and then immediately despised that he immediately despised it. 

“That’s remarkably disturbing,” Wonwoo said, voice monotoned.  “It has hands.”

Mingyu nodded empathetically from his spot against the wall.  “I know, right?  That’s way more disturbing than the bipedal thing.”

“So, it has to be a demon, right?” Junhui put in, eyebrows raised as he stared at Wonwoo expectantly.  “There’s nothing else it could be.”

“It’s not a demon.”  Wonwoo’s tone left no room for argument.  “I told you, I’d know if a demon was summoned anywhere in this town.”  He tossed the phone back to Junhui, who caught it without even looking, and Minghao continued to ignore the weird clenching feeling in his gut at the casual comradery between the two of them, the air of knowing each other’s lives and habits intimately.  _You’re probably just the same with everyone at the Maze_ , he reminded himself sternly.  _So sit down and shut the fuck up_.

_And seriously, stop arguing with yourself.  You need a hobby._

Sighing in obvious annoyance, Junhui looked back at Minghao.  “Could we ask your housemates?  They’re psychics, they have to know _something_ , right?”

“It doesn’t quite work like that,” Minghao replied, still beating the weird angry-clenchy feelings down with a stick.  “They’re all kind of tuned-in to time, so they can see events happening or that have happened or will happen, but they don’t just… _know_ the answers to things.  They might be able to help us get some hints, though.”

“Your roommates are psychics?”  The calming potion seemed to have worked wonders, as Mingyu no longer looked terrified, but rather his eyes were shining with curiosity.  “Are you psychic too, Minghao?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Wha-  _Yes_ , I’m sure!”

“Let’s go there tomorrow,” Junhui interrupted, sounding decisive.  “We really need to get to the bottom of this whole hell-beast thing, before one attacks you and there’s no one around to help.”

“I don’t _need_ to be rescued, you know - ”

“Can I come too?” Mingyu put in with a hopeful expression.  “I’d like to meet psychics.”

“No,” said Junhui. 

“What he _means_ is,” Minghao corrected, shooting Junhui a poisonous glare because seriously, what was up with him?  “Are you sure you want to?  You don’t have to get involved with this anymore if you don’t want.”   

To his surprise, Mingyu rolled his eyes – he wouldn’t have thought the perpetually cheerful guy was capable of sarcasm.  “No, I’d rather try and go about my day tomorrow completely normally, forgetting that any of this ever happened and letting it fester in my subconscious until I go absolutely nuts forever wondering about all the stuff out there.”

A pause.

“Fair point.”  Minghao rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, shooting his lab partner an apologetic look.  “Sorry you kind of got dragged into this in the first place.” 

Mingyu shrugged, back to looking puppy-like once more with his wide, guileless smile.  “I mean, it’s not your fault really, and I _am_ probably going to panic about it again after whatever was in this tea wears off…”  He paused to stare down at the empty teacup in his hands critically, then made an _eh_ noise and continued.  “But I guess knowing is better than not knowing, right?” He shot a blinding grin at Wonwoo, who simply raised an eyebrow in response.  Minghao was honestly impressed – he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of that grin. 

Shaking himself out of those thoughts, Minghao shot a glance at Junhui, who was sitting with folded arms and a scowl pulling down his sharp eyebrows.  “Okay, so… meet at the Maze tomorrow after everyone’s done class?”

“Why the Maze, though?” a new voice whined, and Junhui fell out of his chair with a yelp as Soonyoung was suddenly leaning over him from where he was perched on the arm.  “Then I won’t get to know what happens!”

Mingyu gaped at Soonyoung.  “Where did _you_ come from?”

“How’d you get past my wards?” Wonwoo frowned. 

Minghao sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.  They were going to need some more tea.

 

* * *

 

The next afternoon found Minghao pacing back and forth in front of the Maze door, just barely resisting the urge to be a complete cliché and start biting on his nails.  Several stairs up, Seokmin was sitting upside-down with his legs resting on the landing, head turning side-to-side to track Minghao’s progress as he paced.  He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped as Minghao glared at him.

“Whatever thought I had that you’re about to reply to, don’t.”

“I wasn’t!” Seokmin whined.  “I mean I was, but you don’t have to call me out like that.”

“Save it.”  Minghao resumed pacing.

Seokmin’s head went back to moving in time with his footsteps.  “I was just going to say that you really don’t need to be so worked up about it.  Nothing bad is going to happen.” 

Usually one of his roommates’ predictions would have calmed Minghao’s nerves, but he couldn’t shake the antsy feeling that seemed to have crawled its way under his skin.  He’d been stuck all day thinking about the weird dynamic that had been going on the night before.  Even Soonyoung’s sudden, comical appearance hadn’t quite quelled it, and in fact it had returned full force when it came time to leave.

_(“It’s very late, isn’t it?” Mingyu hummed as they put their shoes back on.  It was a bit of an understatement, seeing as the sun was due to rise in a few hours.  “Minghao, would you like a ride home?”_

_“Oh.”  Minghao paused, considering.  “I was just going to walk, actually…”_

_Mingyu tilted his head to the side, expression obviously concerned.  “Is that a good idea, though?  I mean, given what’s apparently going on.”_

_Biting his tongue, Minghao swallowed down the automatic insistence that he wasn’t a fucking damsel in distress, he didn’t need a babysitter.  “I guess not.”_

_“I could give you a ride home,” Junhui mumbled from nearby, and Minghao startled a bit, having not even realized that the other was listening to them.  “I mean, it’d be on the motorcycle, but…”_

_“I’ll pass,” Minghao said automatically, regarding Junhui curiously.  He’d been remarkably sulky all evening, ever since they’d gotten to the apartment.  “I think I’ll feel safer in the minivan.”  
_

_Junhui just nodded, staring at the ground as he seemed to shrink a bit more where he was standing against the wall.  There was something disconcerting about seeing him like this – it wasn’t the smooth-talking act, or the giggling, chatty Junhui that Minghao had come to know recently.  It wasn’t even the stammering, embarrassed Junhui who had blushed while explaining his Weaving ability while they were in the forest.  He just looked… defeated, almost._

_“Hey.”  Minghao hadn’t even realized he was going to say anything, but there was something about the expression on Junhui’s face that made him feel like he was staring in the face of twenty kicked puppies, and like hell if he wasn’t going to try to make them smile._

_Wait.  Puppies don’t smile._

_Anyways._

_“Hey,” he repeated, shuffling a bit closer.  Junhui finally looked up at him, and Minghao willed himself not to blush at the sudden proximity, reminding himself that they weren’t alone – Mingyu was humming quietly as he put on his shoes behind them, and even though he couldn’t see Wonwoo, Minghao got the distinct feeling that the witch was probably listening in._

_“Thanks for, uh…picking up earlier when I called,” Minghao mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.  “And coming to help, even if it didn’t really work.”_

_Somehow it seemed to have some effect, and Junhui brightened a bit, smiling at him.  “No problem.  I mean,” he added, giving a high-pitched giggle.  “What are friends for, yeah?”_

_Right.  Friends, that’s what they were._

_“Yeah,” Minghao agreed, forcing himself to smile back.  “So, uh…see you tomorrow, then?”_

_“Yeah.  See you.”)_

Seokmin started cackling then, just one step away from screeching as he startled Minghao out of his remembrances, and… dammit.

“Stop fucking eavesdropping!”

“Stop thinking so loudly, then!  I can’t hear it unless it’s on the tip of your tongue, you know that,” Seokmin shot back, grinning devilishly at him, still upside-down.  “But seriously, Minghao, if you couldn’t tell what was going on there, then I’ve got nothing for ya.  You’re on your own with this one.”

“Good, I didn’t want your help anyways,” he muttered, glaring at his friend and forcing himself to bite down on the urge to ask what exactly the other was implying.

Luckily – or unluckily? – the doorbell rang just then, and Minghao swore loudly, spinning around to face the door and wondering if it was Junhui or Mingyu or –

“It’s both.”

 _“Fuck_ you, shut up!” Minghao hissed, shooting Seokmin one more poisonous glare before turning back to the door.  He took a deep breath, then grasped the handle and pulled it open, bracing himself for the awkwardness he was sure to find on the other side…

“ – and so _then_ , Wonwoo was like, ‘Stop trying to catch the cat, Jun, it clearly doesn’t want you,’ and I’m just saying _first_ of all, all cats want love, so jot that down… Oh, hey Minghao!”  Junhui beamed at him, apparently not registering Minghao’s absolutely dumbfounded expression.  Beside him, Mingyu grinned widely and waved.

“Is this where you live, Minghao?  It’s so huge!  I’d heard about it of course, I think everyone knows this place is back here, but I didn’t know you actually _lived_ here – ”

“Just…just come inside,” Minghao finally said when he managed to get his voice back.   He stepped back to let them in, which might have been a mistake, since Seokmin was waiting in ambush with his upside-down grin and blatant air of mischief. 

“Hi,” he said.  “I’m Seokmin, I live here, and I probably know what you’re thinking right now.”

“He doesn’t,” Minghao corrected – lied, potentially – because both Mingyu and Junhui’s eyes had gone very wide as they finished toeing off their shoes.  “He just…hears thoughts, sometimes.”

It didn’t seem to help, because Mingyu blinked and then stared at Seokmin with an open mouth, while Junhui looked even more spooked, if possible. 

“Well this is off to a great start,” Minghao muttered to himself.  “Can you call a family meeting?” he added to Seokmin, who nodded and reached for the megaphone.

“ _HEY EVERYEONE, MINGHAO’S HERE WITH HIS BOY TOYS, COME MEET THEM IN THE READING ROOM!”_ At Minghao’s glare, which he really hoped promised all sorts of horrible torture with no hint of death’s sweet release, Seokmin grinned sheepishly and added, _“ALSO THERE’S SOME ACTUAL LIFE-OR-DEATH STUFF THAT NEEDS TO BE TALKED ABOUT TOO.”_

“I’m going to murder you one of these days,” Minghao said, tone completely neutral.  “And I’m really going to enjoy it.”  Behind him, he could hear Mingyu giggling, while a glance at Junhui showed that the other’s face had turned bright red. 

Seokmin blew him a kiss.  “Love you too.  By the way, you might want to go check if Seungkwan’s coming or not – he was in the kitchen working on some school project earlier.  Seemed very pissy about being disturbed.” 

“Fine.”  Grabbing hold of one shoulder each – and feeling irrationally pissed that he had to reach _up_ to do so – Minghao pushed Mingyu and Junhui past the stairs, in the direction of the reading room.  “Third door on the right, the one with the ugly couches and the karaoke machine.  If you get to the room with the ping pong table on wheels you’ve gone too far.”  Ignoring Mingyu’s curious _‘there’s a ping pong table on wheels?’_ , he turned and made his way across the short distance to the kitchen instead, from which the familiar sound of Seungkwan complaining could be heard.

“Vernon, I told you like five times already, that was _Odysseus_ , not Perseus!  Did you even do the readings?”

“Uhhh…skimmed them.”

Raising an eyebrow at the unfamiliar voice, Minghao poked his head into the kitchen, where Seungkwan was sitting on the floor, art supplies and a clearly half-finished poster strewn around him.  He was glaring at the other teenager in the room, a shaggy-haired boy in an oversized hoodie that drooped over his eyes, who was sitting at the table flipping through what Minghao recognized as one of Chan’s comic books.

“Well either way, can you help me cut out these pictures?”

“Yeah, give me a second.”

“Ugh,” Seungkwan huffed, then looked over at Minghao.  “What do you want?”

Rolling his eyes at the teenager’s rudeness, Minghao leaned against the doorway.  “Family meeting, we need to discuss some shit that’s been happening to me lately.  You in or are you busy?”

Seungkwan huffed, his blonde bangs fluttering a bit.  “Yeah, I heard Seokmin screaming.  As much as I would like to meet your _boy toys_ , and I am very curious about how that became plural, I really need to get this project done sooner rather than later.  Our English teacher’s a bitch and doesn’t give extensions, and Vernon’s got a strict curfew, apparently.”

“I gotta be home by five,” the other boy – Vernon, supposedly – intoned, flipping another page in the comic book. 

“Not that you’re being any great help right now.”

“Hey, I printed all the pictures.”

“Yeah, now help me cut them out!  Oh by the way, you’re a literature major, right?” Seungkwan added, turning back towards the door.  Minghao blinked in confusion, then jumped with a loud curse as he realized that Junhui was hovering in the hallway behind him, apparently having come to see what was going on. 

Junhui blinked, then shuffled forward a bit.  “Uh, yeah?”

“Well, you may want to consider Chekov’s gun.”

“Chekov’s gun?”  The words meant nothing to Minghao, but they clearly did to Junhui, who frowned and tilted his head to the side, as if confused.  “What for?”

Seungkwan huffed again, even more dramatically this time.  “Well _I_ don’t know, now do I?  Now if you two will excuse me, I need to actually get this project done.  Vernon, come _on_ , at least cut out the cyclops for me!”

“Yeah, one sec…”

Shaking his head a bit at the impending Seungkwan storm that he knew was probably coming, Minghao backed out of the kitchen, nudging Junhui to move as well.  The other seemed to still be thinking about whatever it was Seungkwan had said, a pensive frown on lips and a line between his brows, so Minghao sighed and grabbed hold of his wrist to drag him along.

As they reached the reading room, it seemed that everyone else was already inside, the air tense.  Belatedly, Minghao realized that this was the first instance of all – or at least, most – Maze members being in the same vicinity since Jihoon and Seungcheol’s last fight.  The two perpetrators were seated on opposite sides of the room, very firmly not looking at each other, while Jeonghan was rubbing his temples and glancing between the two of them despairingly.  Seokmin had also become uncharacteristically quiet where he was perched on the window seat, though he did wiggle his eyebrows at Minghao as he entered, glancing suggestively between him and Junhui.  Minghao flipped him off for his efforts.

The only two people who seemed at ease were Mingyu and Chan, the elder sitting on the floor and listening with rapt attention as the seven-year-old solemnly pointed out all the features of the Lego city he had apparently been in the process of building. 

“And the evil tyrant lives in this tower.  He’s imprisoned the princess in this fortress, but the other princess is going to sneak in through _this_ secret passage and rescue her –  ”

Jeonghan cleared his throat, reaching out to rest a hand on top of Chan’s head.  “Channie, how about you explain your city later?  I think Minghao needs our help now.”

“Okay.”

The attention shifted, all eyes turning towards Minghao, who belatedly realized he still had one hand wrapped around Junhui’s wrist and quickly let go, whipping his hand behind his own back instead.

 _Super subtle_.

“Uh.  Thanks for agreeing to meet with us,” Minghao mumbled, using his shoulder to nudge Junhui in the direction of the unoccupied couch.  Unfortunately, the fact that all other seats were taken meant that Minghao had to sit right next to him, and despite the tense atmosphere he could sense his housemates’ amusement. 

“So, uh, for the record, this is Junhui,” he began, doing his best to not feel like he was introducing a boyfriend to his parents.  Beside him, Junhui waved.  “And this is Mingyu.  They’re both in my orgo lab.” 

“I’m his lab partner,” Mingyu put in brightly from his spot on the floor.  “I’m also just a normal human, for the record.  ‘Unsighted’, I think they said yesterday.  So I’m very new to all of this.”

Minghao nodded in corroboration.  “Yeah.  Mingyu’s an non-sighted human, and Junhui is…”  Belatedly, he remembered just how much Junhui had resisted telling him about his Weaving, and trailed off to look at the other boy.

“A witch,” Junhui finished for him, smiling easily with the lie.  He sounded exactly as if he were telling the truth, but Minghao quickly looked over at Seokmin – still the only one who knew the whole truth about the motorcycle incident, he was pretty sure – and saw his friend eyeing Junhui suspiciously. 

 _Just don’t say anything, please_.

He didn’t say the words out loud, and he was never _really_ sure if Seokmin could actually read minds or not, but he relaxed slightly as his friend blinked and looked away, apparently not about to spill the beans just yet.

“Junhui’s the one who was with me when the lion he-”

“Lion _monster_ ,” Jeonghan interrupted, correcting him with a warning glance in Chan’s direction.

“…right, lion _monster_ attacked me last week.  And then there was another last night, a horse with hands.  And Mingyu killed it for us.”

“I didn’t mean to kill it really, but I’m glad it helped,” Mingyu said, still smiling.

“I got a picture,” Junhui added as he pulled out his phone, unlocking it and holding it out to the occupants of the other couch.  Jeonghan leaned forward to take it, Seungcheol looking over his shoulder as the two of them frowned in almost perfect synchronization at the image.  Seokmin stood up and moved to lean over them, letting out a low whistle as he peered down at the phone.

“That’s fucked up,” Seungcheol said finally.  Minghao pretended not to notice how Jihoon flinched in his seat across the room at the sound of the other’s voice.

“I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this,” Jeonghan said, shaking his head.  “It almost looks like a minotaur, to be honest, except for the fact that it’s…”

“A horse, yeah,” Junhui nodded.  His eyes had brightened a bit, apparently excited by the chance to discuss literature.  “I thought so too, but it’s not exactly like the minotaur, either, because then the entire body would have been human, instead of just human-like.  In fact, the lion was almost like a chimera, really.  That’s the only similarity between the two creatures that I could think of, though.  But neither of those monsters even exist anymore.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Jeonghan said, which clearly meant that it wasn’t.

Minghao leaned forward a bit, resting his elbows on his knees and running a hand through his hair.  “The point is, that’s two of these h- _monsters_ that have attacked me in two weeks.  I’m fairly certain they’re just going after me, too.  The lion and the horse both totally ignored Junhui, and the horse actually chased me for a really long time.  Like, if it was just out for blood it could have gone and found someone else.”  Raising his head again, he fixed his housemates with a pleading look.  “I _really_ need to figure out what’s going on here.  None of you have seen… _anything_?”

Slowly, one by one, they all shook their heads.  Even Chan.  Even _Seungcheol_.

“I didn’t even know this was happening to you until you told us,” Seungcheol admitted slowly, rubbing a hand thoughtfully against his chin.  Minghao noticed that he hadn’t shaved in a while, skin patchy with stubble.  “It’s like these things don’t even exist within any timescape that I can see.  Like your friend.”

“Soonyoung?”  Minghao blinked.  “Yeah, but we know why you can’t see him.  It’s because he’s dead, so he _doesn’t_ exist within time anymore.  He’s just kinda…around sometimes.” 

“And these things are very obviously not dead,” Junhui put in.  “And capable of being killed.”

“Should we do a reading to see if we can get anything about what they are?” Seokmin suggested, still leaning over the back of the couch.  “At least have Minghao draw a card.  I’m not sure a full reading would work right now.” 

Minghao frowned.  “What do you mean?”

His housemates all made various faces.  “Your energy’s kind of…weird, at the moment,” Jeonghan said finally.  “It’s not like we can’t see you, but clearly _something_ is going on since we haven’t even realized you’ve been in danger.”

“You’re blurry,” Chan intoned, carefully snapping two legos together.

“A full reading probably would just get muddled,” Seungcheol said, nodding slowly.  “Let’s just draw a card.”

“I’ve got it,” Jeonghan said, removing his tarot pack from some pocket and giving it a brief shuffle.  No one questioned why Seungcheol wasn’t doing it – it was obvious that Jeonghan and Seokmin were probably the only two clear-headed enough for an accurate reading.

Jeonghan held out the deck.  “Focus on the monsters, please.  Question what they are.”

Doing his best to focus, Minghao leaned forward and reached directly into the middle, pulling out a card.  He blinked and looked down at it.

“Nine of swords?  Wasn’t that the one about anxiety?”

He saw Seungcheol and Jeonghan exchange a look, then Jeonghan held out the deck again.  “Put it back, please.”  

He did, and Jeonghan shuffled the deck again, a bit more vigorously this time, then held it out once more.  “Again.”

Minghao drew a card.  He just barely caught a glimpse of the man weeping by his bedside, nine swords hung on the wall, before Jeonghan snatched it back. 

Shuffling.  “Again.”

Minghao pulled a card and it was immediately snatched back.

“Again.”

Card.  Snatched back.  Jeonghan turned to Seungcheol.  “Give me your cards.”

Minghao heard Seokmin suck in a startled breath.  None of them used each other’s cards.

Slowly, Seungcheol reached into his pocket and pulled out the tattered deck, handing it over with a wary look.  Jeonghan didn’t even respond, immediately shuffling the cards in an almost vengeful manner.  Minghao could tell that even Junhui and Mingyu had recognized this as unusual, Junhui chewing on his thumbnail nervously while Mingyu kept his eyes on the shuffling cards with rapt attention. 

Jeonghan stopped, took a deep breath, and then held out the cards.  “Again.  Please.”

Minghao took a card and looked at it.  It was the nine of swords.

The room was quiet for a moment.  Then, finally, Jeonghan reached out and took back the card, this time in a much more resigned fashion.  “It must be a mistake,” he said, which meant that it wasn’t.  There was silence again as they all considered the weirdness of the situation, how much they didn’t know.  Then –

“Why you, though?”

Minghao blinked, looking down at where Chan was still seated on the floor.  “Huh?”

Chan blinked back at him.  “Why’re the monsters attacking you?  What did you do to them?”

“I didn’t do anything!”  Great, now he was defending himself to the kid. 

“Chan’s right, though,” Mingyu put in, holding up a hand when Minghao turned to face him with an offended expression.  “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way.  It’s not as important to figure out what these creatures are as it is to figure out why they’re attacking Minghao.  What is it that makes you different than everyone else?”

What made him different than anyone else?  There was only one thing, really.

“I can talk to plants.”

“He can talk to plants.” 

Minghao glanced over at Junhui next to him, who had turned pink at having apparently blurted out the same conclusion.

Mingyu just stared between the two of them. “Why?”

 _What the…_  “What do you mean _why_?” Minghao demanded, still feeling a bit defensive.  “I just can!”

“That’s not a reason,” Mingyu said, shaking his head.  He pointed towards the couch where Jeonghan and Seungcheol were sitting.  “They can see the future, because they’re psychic.  Junhui and his roommate can do magic, because they’re witches.”  Minghao wondered if Mingyu had actually believed that or was just going along with the lie, before gulping as Mingyu moved his hand to point at him.  He suddenly felt very much like he’d been backed into a corner.  “How come you can talk to plants?”

Minghao squirmed in his seat, thought about it, then turned towards Seungcheol. 

Seungcheol just blinked back at him.  “Why’re you looking at me?”

“I figured you’d know.”

“Wait,” Jihoon interrupted.  It was the first time he’d spoken, and Minghao found himself jumping slightly at the exhausted rasp in his housemate’s voice.  Jihoon leaned forward, expression pinched in concentration.  “Minghao, are you saying you _don’t_ know?”

“I- ”  Minghao swallowed, dropping his gaze to his lap momentarily in order to avoid the room full of incredulous stares that were being sent his way.  “I just always could.  No one ever explained it to me.  I never knew my parents, you guys know that – I figured _you_ all would have some better idea than me.”

His housemates all looked at each other, then back at him.

“We kind of thought _you_ knew,” Jeonghan finally said.  “And that you just didn’t want to tell us, for whatever reason.”

“Does your aunt know, maybe?” Seungcheol suggested. 

Minghao shook his head.  “She was so surprised when she found out.”  That was a bit of an understatement – she’d freaked out completely, only calming down after her best friend assured her that Minghao was okay, that sometimes people were a bit…well, magical.

But as far as he could remember, she hadn’t had an explanation either.

A sudden feeling of _wrongness_ crept over him, and Minghao dropped his head once more to hide the grimace that he could feel twisting his face.  He’d never felt anything but fond of his ability before, even when the constant chatter of trees got annoying.  He loved being able to talk to plants, loved the way it made him feel connected to the earth, but now the realization that he didn’t even know _why_ he had this power was causing shame to fill his head.  He didn’t even know what he _was_ …

A hand placed itself on his knee gently, and Minghao blinked, focusing on the long fingers for a second before looking up quickly and realizing that Junhui was watching him with obvious concern. 

“Hey, it’s okay Hao,” he smiled, and Minghao’s brain immediately went blank at hearing the nickname fall from Junhui’s lips.

Fuck, he was so fucking gay.

Junhui was still talking, and Minghao was having a very hard time looking away from the dark brown eyes barely a foot away from his own.  “We can look into why you talk to plants.  Wonwoo’s like, a total research nerd.  He can definitely come up with some theories.”

“Aren’t you a research nerd too?” Minghao managed to say, ignoring how his voice cracked as if he were going through puberty a second time over.  “You’re a _literature_ major.”

Junhui flushed pink, which was… distracting, up close.  “Yeah, but I didn’t exactly want to call myself a nerd,” he mumbled.  His hand was still on Minghao’s knee, heat searing easily through the material of his jeans.

“You are a nerd,” Minghao said.  “A huge nerd.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Are you two gonna kiss?” Chan asked.

Minghao sprang back, not even having realized he was leaning forward, at the same time that Junhui all but whipped his hand off of his knee.  _Fuck_ , that’s right, they were sitting in a room full of people.  Specifically, people who were probably going to taunt the _hell_ out of him for this, if the barely-concealed delight on all of his housemates’ faces was anything to go by.  Even Mingyu looked about two seconds away from giggling, hands covering a wide grin as his eyes flicked back and forth between Minghao and Junhui. 

It took a few seconds for Minghao to realize that he didn’t feel any particular way about that.  Embarrassed, sure, but no more embarrassed than he was about his housemates laughing at him.  

Huh.

Seungcheol coughed exaggeratedly into his fist.  “Well, _anyways,_ as was being said before the soft-core porn intro happened - ” 

(Minghao felt his face flush bright red, and would have reached for something to throw had Jeonghan not gotten there first, smacking Seungcheol over the head with a hissed _“not in front of Chan!”_ )

“Ow,” Seungcheol muttered, rubbing his head with a pout.  “Anyways, we’ll all do some research.  And Hao, maybe call your aunt anyways?  I know she’s a normie, but maybe she noticed something about your parents at some point.” 

Minghao felt his lips twist into a noncommittal expression.  “Eh.  She and my mom weren’t really close, and she apparently never met my father.”  Minghao had always considered his aunt all the family he needed, but of course as a child he’d been curious about his birth parents.  Unfortunately, all questions he asked were shut down pretty quickly – not out of malintent, but just because usually, his aunt genuinely didn’t know the answers.  “I guess I can try, though.  If it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

“We’ll need to figure something out in the meantime, though,” Jeonghan put in insistently.  “It’s obviously not safe for Hao to be out by himself right now if these creatures are going to keep going after him.”

As much as Minghao wanted to bristle at the implication that he was some sort of damsel in distress who needed a fucking _bodyguard_ , he had to admit Jeonghan had a point.

Seokmin tapped his chin thoughtfully.  “I think there’s a cursed knife in the junk room.  He could carry that with him.”

“Cursed knife?” Jeonghan shrieked, at the same time that Mingyu and Junhui chorused, “Junk room?” and Minghao said “ _fuck_ yeah!”

He felt himself flush as everyone turned to stare at him.  “What?” he muttered defensively, resisting the urge to fold his arms and pout like a child.  “I’m sick of having people save me – I want to stab one of these fuckers.”

On his left, Junhui made an aborted noise that sounded almost like a coo, then slapped a hand over his mouth.  Everyone turned to stare at him instead, Minghao included.

Slowly, the hand lowered.  “Sorry,” Junhui said, stuttering slightly, face cherry-red.  “I- it was cute.”

Minghao felt his cheeks flush bright pink.

_Cute._

_Cute cute cute cute cute._

_Wen Junhui just called him cute._

_Because you said you wanted to stab a hell-beast_ , a small part of his brain remarked drily.  _That’s weird_.  The larger part of his brain gave absolutely no shits and was still repeating the word _cute_ at a high frequency.

“Oh my god,” Jihoon groaned, looking between the two of them with an expression of disgust.  “You are absolutely perfect for each other.”

 

* * *

 

(Later, after Minghao had shut the door behind Junhui and Mingyu, it occurred to him that he hadn’t asked where their sudden camaraderie had come from.

Seokmin, who had been walking behind him, let out a bark of laughter.  “You really want to know?  I promise you’ll like it~”

Whirling around, Minghao glared at him.  “Absolutely not.  I have a cursed knife now, don’t make me test it on you.”

Seokmin yelped and scampered away.)

 

* * *

 

“ _Hello_?”  The voice was slightly muffled, slightly cluttered, mixed with several other loud voices that sounded as if they were at a party.  Which, knowing his aunt, they probably were.

“Hey, auntie.”

“ _Hao_!”  There was a distinct shuffling on the other end of the line, the sound of his aunt going _‘I’ll be right back, it’s my little Minghao,’_ and then the background noise cut off with a snap that sounded very much like a door closing.  “ _How are you, sweetie?  Everything okay?_ ”

 _Not even in the slightest_.

It had been over a week, and research was quickly running dry.  Minghao had spent almost every afternoon after classes at Wonwoo and Junhui’s, Mingyu and Soonyoung joining them every now and then as they all scoured the internet and pored over books old enough that the ‘s’s and ‘f’s looked exactly the same.

They’d come up with nothing.  Not even a single possibility to explain why Minghao could talk to plants.  So there he was, at eleven in the morning in a dance studio, calling his aunt on the other side of the world.

Part of him really wanted to tell her the truth, but he knew that even with her lax style of parenting, hearing about all of the weird things that had been happening to him lately would probably freak her out.  She’d always been a bit…odd, with the supernatural.  Like she’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.  “Yeah, it’s fine.  Same old, you know.  College, life at the Maze.”  _Hell-beasts trying to kill me_.

“ _Ah, I’m so glad to hear that.  You’re keeping your grades up, right?_ ”

“Yeah, I am.”  He took a deep breath and leaned back against the mirror, feeling his sweat-drenched shirt sticking a bit to the glass.  Across from him, Soonyoung stretched languidly, hands reaching past his toes.  “Hey, auntie?  Can I ask you something?”

“ _Of course, Hao.  Is it money?  Do you need me to send you more?_ ”

“No, that’s not it.  I just, um…”  Another deep breath.  “I wanted to ask you about my parents.”

The other end of the line was silent for a moment, then he heard his aunt sigh.  “ _Hao, we’ve been over this.  Why are you asking?_ ”

“I know, I just…”  Minghao brought a hand up to rub his eyes, trying his best to ignore the disappointed drop of his stomach.  He knew this wasn’t going to go anywhere… 

“I kind of…met someone,” he said finally.  _Where the fuck did that come from_?  Across from him, Soonyoung’s head snapped up, a grin of amusement curling his lips, which what the fuck, did Soonyoung know Mandarin or did he just have magical _time-to-embarrass Minghao_ senses?  _Fuck off_ , Minghao mouthed at his friend.

His aunt gave a delighted gasp.  “ _You did?!  Like a_ boy _someone?”_

He groaned.  “Yes, like a boy someone, but it’s not a big deal, we aren’t dating or anything.”  For someone who’d been hesitant about the supernatural, his aunt had been extremely accepting when he’d called her at sixteen to confess that he thought he might be gay.  Her exact words, in fact, had been a snort of laughter and then ‘ _Hao, I don’t think you’ve ever even_ looked _at a girl._ ’  “Anyways, we got coffee a bit ago, and we were just like…talking about ourselves, and family was brought up.”  Hey, it wasn’t _really_ a lie – he hated lying to his aunt.  “And I just wondered, you know?  I know you’ve told me mostly everything, but I just wondered if there was anything else.”

She was silent again, then gave another sigh.  “ _Hao, I know it’s natural for you to be curious, but I really don’t have the answers.  I barely saw your mother after she went to college.  Talked to her maybe once or twice a year, at most.”_

“And she was human, right?” he blurted out before he could stop himself.  Biting back a curse, he closed his eyes and added, “I mean, she couldn’t do…what I can, yeah?”

 _“No_ ,” his aunt replied, voice a bit more hesitant now.  “ _No, she couldn’t.  As far as I know, she didn’t have any…abilities, like yours._ ”

“And what about my father?”

 _“I never knew him.  Never even met the guy or knew his name.  Your mother didn’t even put one on your birth certificate._ ”

“She didn’t have any boyfriends at the time?” he persisted.  He knew that he was being pushy, more so than he had in the past, but dammit, this was _important_.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Soonyoung open his mouth, then Soonyoung was gone, but Minghao paid it no mind.  “No one who could even be a possibility?”

The silence was longer this time.  When his aunt spoke again, her voice had gone slightly high-pitched, in a way that Minghao recognized as her being nervous.  _“Hao, you have to realize that anything I say, I’m just making conjectures.  I don’t actually know anything for certain_.”

“So there was someone?”

Another silence, and then finally she gave a resigned sigh.  “ _She and her best friend were inseparable since college.  The few times that I visited, I got the feeling that maybe there was more between them than friendship._ ”

Minghao felt something jolt in his stomach, leaning forward a bit in anticipation.  “You think he could be my father?”

“ _She._ ”

“Huh?”

“ _Minghao, I’m pretty sure your mom was gay.”_

He blinked, leaning back against the mirror again.  It felt substantially less solid than earlier.  “Oh.”  Well, that was… “I guess we have that in common.”

But then…

“ _I’m sorry,”_ his aunt said, her voice soft.  “ _You realize why I didn’t want to tell you._ ”

Yes, because if his mother had been in a relationship that specifically could not result in pregnancy, then the ways that he might have unexpectedly come to be suddenly narrowed down to a very few possibilities.  None of them looked that good.

“What happened to her?” he heard himself say.  “The best friend.”

“ _I don’t know_.”  His aunt sounded as if she might be trying not to cry, or maybe her voice was just thick with worry over his own reaction.  “ _I think she was foreign, she wasn’t around when you were born… But your mother always seemed to talk as if she was coming back at some point._ ”  A pause, then – “ _She wasn’t at the funeral, though_.”

“Oh.”  Maybe he should say something else, but his brain seemed to have gone strangely blank.

“ _Are you mad at me, Hao?  I know I should have told you sooner_.”

“No.”  He wasn’t.  It was just that this had been the one possible thread he could grasp, that if he pulled enough maybe he would find out who he was… but instead he’d pulled and it had broken off in his hand.  “I’m not.  I’m just… it kind of raises more questions than it does answers.”

He could tell she was going to try and say something, so he interrupted with “You should go back to your party.”

She could probably hear the dismissal in his voice.  “ _I- okay_.”  Another pause, this one even more pregnant than all the ones before, and then she added, “ _You know this doesn’t change anything, right?  You’re still my little Haohao, and I love you_.”

Minghao took a deep breath, the reminder loosening some of the tightness in his chest.  Not a lot, but a little bit.  “I know.  I love you too, auntie.”

“ _Call me if you need anything, okay?_ ”

What he needed was some answers.  “I will.  Bye.”

He hung up before she could, tossing his phone to the side.  It slid across the marley floor, the sound echoing in the now-empty dance studio.  Minghao shot a slightly annoyed look at the spot where Soonyoung had been.  He was pretty sure the other didn’t have any control over when he appeared and disappeared, but it would have been nice to have someone to talk to instead of being left alone to stew in this new disappointment. 

Dropping his head, Minghao pressed his forehead against his knees, taking a deep breath.  So.  It seemed likely that there was no way to ever know about his father.  Or… sperm donor, or whoever.  And if his aunt had no ideas, then there probably wasn’t anyone else who could tell him why he could do the things he could do, who knew what he was…

Was there?

Minghao raised his head again, eyes flickering towards the window as an idea trickled into his mind.  Across the parking lot outside, the forest waved back at him. 

He scrambled to his feet.  He had been specifically warned about going anywhere alone, but this was important, god dammit.  And besides, he had his own protection now, he reminded himself as he made a beeline for his backpack and opened up the second pocket, reaching inside and pulling out the pocket knife.  It hummed dangerously as it was exposed to the air.

Cursed things tended to do that.

Clipping the knife to the waistband of his athletic shorts, Minghao left his backpack where it was sitting and hurried out of the studio, dodging a few people going to either class or practice as he made his way out of the arts building. 

The second his feet touched the grass next to the parking lot, he could hear the trees whispering, tense with anticipation.  He pushed forward regardless, parking lot and the sounds of campus fading behind him as he followed a dirt trail into the woods, worn down by countless students walking it over the years.  

He stopped about twenty feet in and fixed the forest with a determined stare.  The tress rustled back at him nervously.

“ _I know you know_ ,” he said finally, voice echoing slightly.  “ _So just tell me_.”

A wave of anxiety swept through the branches, filling the woods with a low hiss.

_Can’t say._

_Ancient secrets…_

_Go home, child…_

“ _You_ do _know_ ,” he repeated.  The miserable resignation that had been threatening to overtake him after the phone call with his aunt vanished, replaced by a renewed resolve.  “ _Tell me_.”

The trees still just rustled back at him unwillingly, and Minghao sighed.  “ _Please_ ,” he said.  He could hear the desperation in his own voice, bleeding into the usually calm language of the woods.  “ _I’m actually in danger.  You know I am.  If I know what I am, maybe I’ll have a better chance at defeating… whatever these things are.  I know you’re scared of them too.  Help me, please._ ”  He paused, then added, _“You always help me._ ”

They rustled again, louder this time, a seemingly hurried whispered argument amongst themselves.  One tree was silent – an ancient oak.  Minghao fixed his gaze on it, and could have sworn he felt it watching him in return.

“ _Please_ ,” he said.  The oak sighed, and the rest of the trees fell silent.

_Nephilim._

_Child of the angels._

The words hit him with a physical force, causing him to stagger back slightly. Behind him, something that was definitely not the forest hissed, and the shock immediately transformed into a blinding rage.

“Oh, you know what?” Minghao yelled, spinning around and ripping the knife from his waist.  He didn’t even blink this time at the hell-beast, a giant snake with three heads that were raised to a height rivaling his own.  “ _Perfect_ fucking timing!”  He flicked the knife open and it practically screamed, glowing with a malicious energy.  “You want some?  Come and fucking get it!”

The snake’s three heads hissed, coiled back, and then launched.  Minghao swung the knife forward, and –

It sank into the brick wall in front of him, at the same moment that he heard the snake crunch loudly against the other side.

“Minghao?!  Are you okay?” 

_What the actual fuck…_

The brick wall wavered, then vanished, revealing no snake-beast behind it, but instead his orgo TA standing on the dirt trail, hand outstretched and eyes glowing with a faint white light. 

 _What.  The Actual.  Fuck_.

His TA lowered his hand.  “Are you – ”

“Are you _FUCKING KIDDING ME?_ ” Minghao bellowed, voice bouncing off the trees and causing the other boy to jump back, eyes no longer glowing but widened in alarm.  To be quite honest, however, Minghao sincerely _did not give a shit._

“Once!  Just _once_ I would like to stab one of these motherfuckers!  Why the _fuck_ do I keep having to be rescued by hot fucking guys from my orgo lab?!  I fucking hate that class!  This is the third fucking time and I am _not having it anymore!_ ”

The echo of his words rang through the forest, birds chirruping in alarm up above them.  His TA was motionless, mouth hanging open slightly in shock.  Closing his eyes, Minghao reached his free hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. 

“Sorry.  I’ve had a very stressful couple of weeks.”  A pause, then he added, “No offence about the hating class thing.  It’s not you, orgo just kind of sucks.”

“It’s okay,” the TA said.

Minghao lowered his hand and opened his eyes, fixing the other with a blank look.  “There was a brick wall.”

The other’s eyes dropped, hands wringing together in front of him.  “Yes.”

“You made it appear.”

“Yes.” 

“Right.”  Minghao sighed and ran a hand through his hair, tilting his neck to the side and groaning as it cracked.  “I think I’m gonna have to ask you to come meet some people with me.  I think we need to talk.  And, uh…”  He paused, fixing the other with a guilty stare.  “This is kind of awkward, but I really don’t remember your name.”

To his surprise, his TA smiled, the same soft smile that Minghao had seen in lab every week.  “That’s okay, I don’t think a lot of the students do.”  He laughed slightly, shaking his head.  “It’s Joshua.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The gang's all here. (I promise Minghao can stop getting rescued now lmao.)
> 
> Let me know what you think about plot stuff happening, and your theories about why Jun and Mingyu suddenly got along so well.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it has been....way too long. Seriously, I apologize for making you guys wait, especially given that this chapter is shorter than usual :( Life is a pain in the butt tbh, but I've got some time off work now for the holidays, so I'm hopeful that the next chapter will come much quicker than this one did. 
> 
> Anyways, enjoy~

Minghao knocked on the apartment door, more as a signal that he was entering than an actual request, then opened it and stepped inside.  He’d stopped waiting for Wonwoo or Junhui to get the door by the third or fourth day of research.  They left it unlocked all the time, anyways – Wonwoo assured him that anything actually unwelcome wouldn’t be able to get in regardless of whether the door was locked or not. 

Minghao was starting to realize that Junhui’s stories about how scary Wonwoo could be hadn’t actually been exaggerated much. 

Behind him, Joshua hovered anxiously, both hands clutching the strap of the messenger bag slung over his shoulder.  Minghao wondered briefly if the supposed wards would keep him out, but the TA stepped over the threshold with no problem other than the apparent nervousness.  He supposed that was a good sign.

“Hello?” Minghao called out, toeing off his shoes and dropping his backpack with a _thump_.  “Is everyone here?”

A chorus of _yeah_ ’s echoed back at him from the living room, followed by Mingyu adding, “Almost!”  Which Minghao took to mean that Soonyoung hadn’t appeared with all the others after vanishing from the dance studio.

“So, something happened,” he said as he made his way into the apartment, then amended, “Actually, a lot happened.”  Sure enough as he turned the corner, Wonwoo and Junhui were side-by-side on the couch, a heavy book opened in front of them, while Mingyu seemed to actually be doing homework, laying on his stomach on the floor while typing furiously on his laptop.

(It turned out that Mingyu was a computer science major.  With a cybersecurity specialization.  And a minor in computer engineering.  Minghao really needed to stop judging people by first impressions.)

(Also, why were there so many smart people who sucked at organic chemistry?)

(Maybe orgo just sucked in general.)

(Anyhow.)

Junhui looked up at him, eyebrows furrowed in obvious concern.  “Everything okay?  It wasn’t another hell-beast, was it?”

“Did you kill it with the cursed knife?” Mingyu put in brightly, glancing away from his laptop with a curious expression. 

Minghao heard Joshua mumbling _cursed knife?_ behind him.  “Yes, it was another hell-beast, and no, I didn’t get to stab anything, unfortunately.”  He stepped to the side then, and saw Mingyu and Junhui’s eyes widen with recognition, while Wonwoo just tilted his head in obvious confusion.

“Is this about my last report grade?” Junhui blurted out immediately.  “I promise I tried really hard, and Minghao’s tutoring me so the next one will be better!”

Joshua chuckled softly, though Minghao noticed he made no move to step forward, and that his hands had not yet let go of their tight grip on his bag.  “No, it’s not about that.  I’m not here as your guys’ orgo TA, but as someone who it seems is from the same world as you all.  Although,” he added, serene smile dropping into a frown.  “I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that creature from earlier.  But it sounds as if you guys have?”

“What did it look like?” Junhui said, at the same time that Mingyu said “Oh, I’m not actually from this world, I’m just visiting,” and Wonwoo said “What _is_ it about your orgo lab?”

Minghao gestured victoriously towards Wonwoo.  “Exactly!  _Thank_ you!”

“Law of attraction, maybe,” Joshua suggested, hitching his bag a bit higher on his shoulder before turning towards Junhui once more.  “It… well, it looked like a giant snake, but with three heads.  I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”

Junhui nodded slowly, eyes unfocused in a way that Minghao was starting to recognize as the face he wore when his brain was off in some book or another.  “Python, maybe?  Mixed with Cerebus?  There seems to be a theme of mythology, specifically Greek,” he added by way of explanation, before seemingly snapping back to the present as he quickly crossed the room to stand in front of Minghao – who most certainly was _not_ blushing at the sudden proximity, thank you very much.  “But you’re okay, right Hao?  It didn’t get you at all?”  The concern in his voice was palpable, eyebrows furrowed and one hand half-lifted, as if he had been about to reach out to Minghao and then changed his mind.

_Wen Junhui needs to be stopped_ , Minghao’s brain reported hazily.  His heart thumped its agreement. 

“I’m fine,” he said, and his voice did not crack _at all_ , so Mingyu could stop snickering behind his laptop – Minghao shot him a glare to say as much. 

Junhui nodded.  “Well that’s good, at least.”  Clearly deciding Minghao hadn’t been embarrassed enough, he then proceeded to wrap his hand around Minghao’s wrist and pull him over to the couch, forcing him to sit between him and Wonwoo.  The witch rolled his eyes, but obligingly scooted over to the side. 

“So if you didn’t stab it, what happened?” Mingyu asked, shutting his laptop and shifting into a sitting position.  “And what does Joshua have to do with this?”

Okay, so maybe Minghao _was_ a bad person for forgetting their TA’s name.

“That’s what we need to talk about.”  Minghao rolled his head back, the images of barely an hour before flickering over his mind eye once more.  It didn’t make any more sense in retrospect than it had at the time. 

“So, picture this," he began.  "Hell-beast appears while I’m on that trail behind the arts building.  It’s a giant fucking snake with three heads.  I pull out the knife, all ready to shank a scaly bitch, and then a brick wall appears in front of me.  Snake crashes into it, dissolves, the usual business.  Joshua’s there.  End fucking scene.”

Silence followed his words, broken only by the sound of Joshua shuffling his feet uncomfortably on the wood floor. 

“A brick wall…appeared?” Wonwoo said slowly, and Minghao didn’t even have to look at the witch to know he was wearing that one expression he’d seen many times over the past week, where a single eyebrow was traveling high up his forehead in obvious skepticism.  “I know you sometimes compare Soonyoung to a brick wall, but they don’t typically have his ability to ignore laws of physics and pop out of nowhere.”

In response, Joshua made an odd squeaking noise, at the same time that Soonyoung said, “Ignoring the obviously false slander to my intelligence, I’m gonna have to agree with Wonwoo on this one.”

Minghao sighed and turned towards were Soonyoung was now lounging casually on Wonwoo’s worktable, ignoring the absolutely poisonous glare the witch was giving him.  “Your timing is uncanny,” he said, then turned to Joshua in order to give the usual _this is Soonyoung, he’s dead_ spiel.  The words died on his tongue, however, at the sight in front of him.  His chem TA had turned absolutely white, hands up over his mouth and eyes fixed on Soonyoung, the expression in them more akin to terror than anything else.

Soonyoung tilted his head and frowned at Joshua.  “Do I…know you?”

Minghao turned back to Soonyoung and stared.  “ _Do_ you?”

Joshua lowered his hands quickly, shaking his head with vigor.  “No!  No, you don’t.  I just… you startled me, that’s all.”

 Frowning a bit, Minghao glanced between Joshua, who still looked terrified, to Soonyoung, who looked as if he were thinking very hard, and then between the other three in the room, who all looked as if they were somewhere between confusion and suspicion.  Frankly, he was right there with them.

“Are you sure?” Soonyoung said finally.  “Sorry, you just look pretty familiar.  But that might just be me.”

Joshua nodded.  “Positive.  Uh…who are you, actually?”

As if on reflex, nearly all of them said, “That’s Soonyoung, he’s dead.”

“Oh.”  That didn’t seem to calm Joshua’s apparent panic at all, as his hands moved to tightly grip the strap of his messenger bag once more.  Minghao was half worried he was going to rip the thing, honestly.  “That’s…unfortunate?”

“Not really,” Soonyoung said, apparently having forgotten his original confusion as he sat up on the table with a shrug.  “I’m used to it, anyways.  Now what was that about brick walls?”

“He made one appear,” Minghao answered, and the focus of the room shifted to Joshua once more.  The guy seemed to shrink a bit in front of them, stepping back and ducking his head, as if to hide behind his light brown hair.  “So, yeah.  Mind telling us how that happened?”

One moment’s pause, two, and then Joshua sighed, shoulders slumping in apparent resignation.  “Yes.  It’s a bit of a long story, though.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Mingyu chirruped, smiling kindly.  “Take your time.”

Slowly, the hands still tightly clutching the strap moved, lifting the bag up and over Joshua’s head and then dropping it on the floor.  “May I?” he asked, gesturing towards the armchair on the other side of the coffee table from where Minghao, Junhui and Wonwoo were squished together on the couch.  Minghao started to nod, remembered he didn’t actually live there, so instead let Junhui and Wonwoo nod for him.  Joshua sat on the edge of the armchair, as if he were planning on bolting at a moment’s notice.  Minghao couldn’t help but notice that he glanced at Soonyoung once more before clearing his throat and starting to speak.

“So, I suppose it really began about a thousand years ago.  There were two friends who gained the favor of an angel - ”

“Holy _shit_ ,” Junhui blurted out on Minghao’s left, eyes wide and mouth hanging open.  “Are you a Weaver too?”

“I-  A what?”  Joshua blinked in a bewildered manner, clearly thrown off.  “No, I’m a Manifest.  What’s a Weaver?”

“ _I’m_ a Weaver,” Junhui insisted, and Minghao could practically hear Wonwoo rolling his eyes on his other side, because _so much for secrecy_.  “What’s a Manifest?”

“Me!  I’m a Manifest!”  If he had seemed bewildered before, Joshua looked completely lost by this point.  “What does weaving have to do with anything?”

“You’re the other half of the story,” Wonwoo said quietly, and the rest of them fell silent as they turned to face the witch, who wore a contemplative expression.  “Your ancestor was gifted with the ability to manipulate space.”

“I- Yes,” Joshua said, fingers twisting in his lap.  “How did you know that?” 

Wonwoo didn’t respond, instead flicking his eyes towards Junhui, as if to say _Well, go on, you already spilled the beans anyways._

“I’m a Weaver,” Junhui said, this time calmly instead of blurting it out.  “I manipulate time.”  Leaning forward, he reached out and knocked one of the many books that were standing upright on the coffee table onto the floor with a dull _thud_.  His hand made a complicated grabbing motion in the air, and the scene reversed itself, the book flying back upwards to stand as if it had never been touched in the first place.  “The family legend was always that our ancestor’s friend could manipulate space, but that part was always just…glossed over, I guess.  No one really thought that the gift still existed.”

JJoshua nodded slowly, eyes wide and fixed on the book.  “Same here.  I suppose our families lost contact some point over the last thousand years.”

“So, you manipulate space?” Mingyu put in, tone curious as ever.  “How does that work?  Why’s it called a Manifest?”  Frankly, Minghao was wondering the same thing.  Manipulating space didn’t seem to equate to pulling brick walls out of nowhere.

“It’s a bit of a misnomer,” Joshua said softly, still twisting his fingers a bit, though not as vigorously as before.  “It’s not that I’m creating anything – that would go against the laws of physics.  It has to do a lot with the multiverse theory.  Hypothetically, you see, there’s innumerable universes, each one slightly different than the other.  My gift allows me to bend space enough that things…slip through.  If I can conjure the image of something in my mind, I can pull it from the universe where it exists.”             

Minghao raised an eyebrow.  “So basically, what you’re saying is that you’re an interdimensional thief.”

Joshua flushed dark red, expression turning slightly offended.  “I- no!  I’m sure they go _back_ after I borrow them!”

“It wasn’t an insult.”  Minghao leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.  “That’s fucking sick, man.  So you can pull anything you can imagine?”

“Yes, with some limitations.  And it’s not exactly easy.”  The blush deepened, if that were possible, as Joshua ducked his head.  “In fact, I’m considered rather, ah, _weak_ , historically.  You know, in comparison to past Manifests.”

Minghao didn’t look over at Junhui, but could practically _feel_ the instant waves of empathy and kinship radiating off the Weaver.

“But yes,” Joshua continued, looking up at them once more.  “I can manifest almost any object that I can imagine.  And with the infinite number of multiverses, just because something doesn’t exist _here_ doesn’t mean it isn’t possible elsewhere.  In essence, the sky’s the limit.” 

Silence followed that proclamation, and Minghao knew that they were all imagining the endless possibilities that the other had laid in front of them.  Joshua’s statement that he was ‘weak’ suddenly didn’t seem all that accurate.  If he was weak, what would a strong Manifest be like?

As if reading his mind, Wonwoo asked, “Are there any other Manifests in your family currently?”

Joshua shook his head.  “No, none that I know of.  It’s very rare.”

“So is Weaving,” Junhui put in.  “I’m the only one currently.”

“Wow.”  Mingyu propped his elbow on the coffee table, resting his chin in his hand as he looked between Joshua and Junhui.  “Quite the coincidence for you guys to have met, huh?  First time in who knows how many years since those two friends were blessed by the angel.”

_Angels._ Fuck.

_Nephilim.  Child of the Angels._

Minghao cleared his throat, shifting a bit in his seat as the attention of the room turned towards him.  “Yeah, um… there’s something else, too.  Besides Joshua and his super crazy space powers.”

“What is it?” Junhui asked, and _dammit_ , he had that concerned look on his face again.

Chewing his lower lip slightly, Minghao tried to think of the best way to break the news that _hey, apparently I’m of divine origin! Crazy, huh?_   “Well, I called my aunt.”

“Did she know anything?” Wonwoo asked immediately, leaning forward with a glint in his eye that tended to appear when finding a particularly interesting piece of research.  “About your parents?”

Minghao shook his head, and could almost feel all the others – except Joshua, who seemed somewhat confused – sag with disappointment.  “Not really.  She said she was pretty sure that my mom was gay and had a girlfriend – her best friend from college – before I was born, but she didn’t know what happened to her.”

“So that’s a dead end, then?”  Mingyu frowned, tilting his head a bit.  “I guess we could try and dig into your mom’s college records if need be- ”

Minghao shook his head.  “No need.  I realized there was someone else I could ask.  Kind of obvious in retrospect, but it really never occurred to me until then.”  At their expectant looks, he added, “The trees.”

At that, Wonwoo actually smacked his own forehead, causing everyone to start and stare at him.  “Sorry, I just can’t believe we didn’t think of that.”

“Yeah, me either.”  Pulling his legs up to rest socked feet on the edge of the couch, Minghao wrapped his arms around his knees and kept his eyes on the holes in his jeans in order to avoid looking at the others.  “But yeah.  Asked them.”

“And?”  It was Junhui prompting him, and something about the softness of his voice told Minghao that the other had definitely noticed his unease.  “Did they know?”

He swallowed heavily.  “Well, they said… _something_.  I have no idea if it’s true or not.” 

Deep breath.  In, out.  “They said…nephilim.  Child of the angels.”

Silence.  Not even a gasp of surprise, which Minghao personally thought might have been easier to deal with.  He chanced looking up, and saw that all of the others were staring at him with varying degrees of bewilderment.  Even Joshua, who had just revealed his own extremely weird background.  Even _Soonyoung_.

It was Junhui who spoke first, and he didn’t address Minghao.  Instead, he looked past Minghao to Wonwoo and asked, “Is that possible?”

Minghao felt himself bristling automatically.  “I’m not lying!”

Wonwoo blinked slowly behind his glasses.  “Well, it’s not… _im_ possible, I suppose.  There certainly haven’t been any reports of angels on this mortal plane anytime in that last several hundred years, but I suppose they wouldn’t have any reason to reveal themselves.”             

“Have there been other Nephilim before?” Mingyu asked, and Minghao could see his fingers twitching towards his laptop.  “Could they talk to plants too?”

The witch was already on his feet, shuffling over towards a pile of books and shifting through them impatiently.  “They’ve existed in stories, yes, but who’s to say they weren’t real?  There’s nothing that’s common knowledge, anyways, or else it would have come up in our research already.  I’ll have to look into it.”

“Can I help?” Joshua offered softly, then seemed to catch himself, cheeks turning red.  “I mean, if you’re alright with me joining.  It just seems very interesting, and I’d love to know more.”

Minghao blinked.  “Yeah, uh…sure, I guess.”

“Does this mean I can ask you for help on my lab reports?” Junhui put in hopefully.

“No.”

“Dammit.”

“Might as well get started, then,” Mingyu said, pulling his laptop towards him and opening it once more.  “Even if Minghao is Nephilim, that doesn’t answer what the creatures are or why they’re attacking him.”  He paused, seemingly considering, then shrugged.  “Actually, it doesn’t answer a lot of questions, but at least we have somewhere to start now.  Even if it’s something no one had even known existed before.”

“Damn Hao!” Soonyoung cackled.  He jumped off the table, crossing the room and ruffling Minghao’s hair as he passed.  “You’re even weirder than me!”

Some of the tension that seemed to have wound its way around Minghao’s lungs released itself, and he exhaled heavily.  The others were all throwing themselves headfirst into this new task, Joshua opening up the book Wonwoo had handed him, while Soonyoung leaned over Mingyu’s shoulder and pointed to websites on the screen they could check. 

They believed him.  Maybe that was really what he needed to believe it himself.

“Nobody is weirder than you,” he shot back at Soonyoung, and gave a mental sigh of relief that his voice didn’t shake and betray the sudden welling up of emotion.

“Seconded,” he heard Junhui say next to him, and felt the other nudge his shoulder slightly.  “I guess you really are an angel, Hao.  Or, half of one, at least.”

_Aaaaand, that’s it, I’m dead_.

Out of the corner of his eye, Minghao could see Mingyu laughing at him again.  Dammit.

* * *

“He likes you,” Mingyu said later as he was driving Minghao home.  That bombshell happened to be dropped at the same time Minghao was pulling his phone from his pocket, and he immediately fumbled the thing, causing it to slip from his fingers and fall beneath the van’s passenger seat.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hissed, leaning forward and sticking his hand in the gap.  It was just as much to recover his phone as it was to hide the way he could feel his face immediately flushing with heat.   “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

_Liar_ , the mental Jeonghan voice scolded him, and god _damn_ he really needed to get rid of that.

Wait, was he no longer allowed to say goddamn if he was part angel?

Fucking hell.

Wait, he probably couldn’t say that either.

Shit.

Nope, that wasn’t any better.

Mingyu’s laugh interrupted Minghao’s internal semi-crisis over his profanity.   “Jun.  He likes you.”

Fingers finally managing to close around his phone, Minghao sat back up, pointedly maintaining a neutral expression despite the fact that he could still feel his cheeks burning what was probably a bright red.  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m serious.” 

“What, did he tell you or something?” he replied, voice as scathing as possible.  Sarcasm, always the best defense mechanism.

Mingyu hummed, the van slowing at a stop sign as he put on his blinker.  “Didn’t have to.  It’s pretty obvious.”

“You have no proof of that statement,” Minghao replied. 

Raising an eyebrow sardonically – in an expression that reminded Minghao of Wonwoo, for some reason – Mingyu shot him a look that could only be described as a nonverbal _bitch please_.  “He’s constantly trying to impress you or get your attention, he pretty much only looks at you and no one else when you’re in the room, and he calls you things like cute and angel.”

Well damn.  Minghao hadn’t expected that detailed of a response.  But still…

“I think you’re full of shit.  He called me cute _once_ , and he said I’m an angel because…well, I am.  Apparently.  Half angel, anyways.  As for the other stuff, I would have noticed if that were true.”

Mingyu scoffed.  “Yeah, right.  You’re kind of oblivious, Hao.”      

Minghao gaped at his lab partner, who seemed totally unaware of the irony of his words, humming a bit as he drove.  “ _I’m_ oblivious?”  The _nerve_ , the sheer _audacity_ of the guy he’d had a crush on for months calling _him_ oblivious.

Apparently once again ignoring Minghao’s internal crisis, Mingyu kept humming for a few more seconds, then looked over with raised eyebrows.  “So?”

“So what?”

“So, do you like him back?” 

He frowned.  “Why’re you asking?”

Shrugging, Mingyu drummed his fingers rapidly on the steering wheel a few times, looking almost sheepishly excited.  “I dunno, I guess I just think you guys would be cute together.”

Minghao stared at him.  Again.  “Are you… _shipping_ us?”

Mingyu laughed, clearly unashamed.  “Yeah, a bit.”

“Unbelievable.”  This was Minghao’s life now.  He was half angel, he was being attacked by mysterious hell-beasts, his lab TA was an interdimensional thief, and his former crush was shipping him with his current crush.

Wait.  He’d just called Junhui his crush.

Fuck.

“Whatever,” he muttered, crossing his arms and staring determinedly out the window.  Denial had served him well thus far, and he wasn’t about to give it up without a fight, dammit.  “I still think you’re wrong, but either way it doesn’t matter.  I don’t have a crush on Jun.”

You know.  Like a liar. 

_Thank you, inner John Mulaney_.  Seriously, what was with all these people in his head?

Mingyu laughed again.  “If you say so, Hao.  Just keep telling yourself that the next time you see him.”

“I will.”

* * *

_I don’t have a crush on Jun.  I don’t have a crush on Jun_.

Jun huffed impatiently from where he was sitting next to Minghao’s bed, bangs fluttering upwards slightly, and Minghao’s heart flipped over in his chest.

Fuck.

“Fuck.”

“Huh?”  Junhui looked up at him.  “Did you say something?”

Panic.  “No.”  Not convincing.  “Uh…”  Minghao cleared his throat, nodding his head towards the papers spread out on the bed and floor.  “Just, fuck this assignment, you know?”

“Oh, yeah.”  Junhui giggled, and Minghao did _not_ feel like turning into a puddle of goo on top of his quilt, thank you very much.  “I mean, I feel the same, but it’s a bit weird to go back to being upset at Joshua for assigning so much homework now that he’s like.  One of us, sort of.”

“I think it’s more the professor than him, anyways.”  When Junhui and Mingyu had started complaining about orgo homework taking time away from research, Joshua had turned towards them with the brightest smile and said, _‘I sold my soul to a professor in the hopes that I will someday get a piece of paper to put two letters in front of my name, and I have absolutely no control over my life or anything that happens therein_.’  The chipper tone had made it all the more depressing,

"True.  It’s not like we’re really working on it anyways.”  

“Fair point.”  It was true.  They’d had the lab notes spread in front of them for almost an hour now, but Minghao had spent most of the hour fooling around on his phone, while it seemed that Junhui was practicing his weaving again.  As Minghao watched, the other boy pushed his water bottle over with a _thud_ , letting it sit for a few seconds, before making the grabbing motion in the air that Minghao recognized as pulling the supposed ‘ribbons’ of time. 

The water bottle stayed resolutely on its side, and Junhui groaned in frustration again. 

“Too long?” Minghao guessed.

Junhui nodded, pulling at his bangs – a gesture Minghao had come to notice was a habit when the other was embarrassed.  “I keep trying to push it farther, but I still can’t do more than a few seconds.”

Shrugging, Minghao finally decided to give up the pretense of doing homework and flopped down onto his back, bouncing a bit on the mattress before coming to a stop.  “I mean, if you ask me the whole thing is pretty impressive to start with.  The fact that you can turn back time at all is pretty useful, even if it is only a couple of seconds.”

“I can get better, though,” he heard Junhui insisting, and turned to face the other once more.  Jun was chewing his lower lip, staring at the water bottle determinedly as he set it upright again.  “There have been Weavers who got up to much more than I can.  I just need to keep practicing.”

Minghao stared as Jun pushed the water bottle over for the umpteenth time, muttered _one, two, three_ , and then grabbed the air.  The bottle quivered a bit, but didn’t return to its original position.  Junhui’s face twisted into a sour expression. 

“There’s no rush though, is there?” Minghao asked slowly, if only to try and make Junhui feel better.  “Like, you can keep practicing, but you don’t need to push yourself so hard.”

"But there is.”  Junhui bit his lip again and looked over, and Minghao felt his breath catch slightly as their gazes met, suddenly becoming aware of the proximity between them.  “Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?” he asked, hoping his voice didn’t sound as hazy as he felt.

“Feel that…something’s happening.”  Junhui had turned to face him completely now, kneeling next to the bed and leaning forward, eyes practically shining with intensity as he spoke.  “Everything that’s been going on these last few weeks – us meeting, the hell-beasts attacking, becoming friends with everyone, and now Joshua and his powers, and you being Nephilim…. Doesn’t it feel like it’s all leading to something?  It’s rising action, and the climax is going to come sooner or later.  We need to be ready when it does.”

The air had gotten heavy.  It felt like it did sometimes when Minghao was watching a reading being done, and the air got heavy and even though he wasn’t psychic he knew that the Universe was _there_ in that moment, watching them and judging just how much of its secrets to give up.

Minghao took a shaky breath.  “Are you sure you’re not literature major-ing this into something more than it actually is?  Turning it into some sort of story?”

Junhui shook his head, leaning even closer, and there was barely a foot between them now.  “Everything’s a story if you really look at it.”

_You’re gonna have to finish the story._

“Something’s going to happen,” Junhui was insisting, and for a moment, Minghao found himself nodding in agreement, gaze drifting down to the other’s lips as he leaned a bit closer…

There was a crash from downstairs, and the moment snapped in half, the two of them practically scrambling back from each other as Minghao sat up hurriedly and Junhui turned to look at the door.  “Are they fighting again?” he asked, and Minghao pretended not to notice how the other’s face had turned bright red.  He was pretty sure he was somewhere along the same line, if the burning of his cheeks was any indication.

He shook his head.  “They shouldn’t be.  They haven’t even gotten over the last one yet.  Usually it takes another couple months for them to get to that point…”  The sound of footsteps quickly growing louder interrupted him, and before Minghao could even think _oh shit_ , Seokmin was throwing open the door.  Any expectation Minghao had of some comment on their clearly flustered states, however, quickly died at the somber expression on his housemate’s face.

“I don’t suppose Jihoon is up here with you two?” Seokmin asked. 

Minghao blinked, glancing down at Junhui, who looked just as confused as he felt.  “Uh.  No?  Why’re you asking?”

Seokmin just fixed him with a Look, and something icy cold slid into the pit of Minghao’s stomach. “You’d better come downstairs.”  Hopping to his feet, Minghao followed the other out of the room, Junhui trailing behind as they quickly went down the two flight of stairs into the kitchen.

The moment they stepped inside, Minghao could tell that something was horribly wrong.  The atmosphere was quiet in a way that the Maze never was.  No matter how many people were asleep, no matter how much Jihoon threatened them all to shut up, there was still always something very _alive_ about the Maze.  It practically vibrated with vitality at all hours. 

There was something dead about it now.

Seungcheol was slumped over the kitchen table, eyes vacant and unseeing in a way that Minghao had only heard of, but never seen for himself.  Jeonghan stood over him with a hand resting on his back, while Chan sat quietly nearby.  On the other side of the room, Seungkwan was silently sweeping up what looked like a shattered glass that had previously held, if the amber liquid seeping across the floor was anything to go by, a sizable amount of whiskey. 

“What’s happening?” Minghao heard himself whisper. 

Jeonghan looked at him, and the expression on his face was more defeated than Minghao had ever seen before.  “Jihoon left.”

His breath caught in his throat, in a very different way than it had a few minutes before.  “Left?  As in - ”

“As in, his stuff is all gone,” Jeonghan said.  “He’s moved out of the Maze.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things...  
> 1\. Can you tell that I'm much better at writing action than ~feelings~?  
> 2\. PhD students are some of the most miserable creatures on earth and my heart breaks for them (I work in a lab and my boss keeps trying to get me to do a PhD and I'm like NOPE)  
> 3\. I think this whole story may just be me venting a personal vendetta against organic chemistry. 
> 
> Anyways, as always leave kudos and comments to motivate me to actually write and get this out in a (somewhat) timely manner!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, an update so soon?? The holiday wasn't exactly peaceful, but it did give me time and motivation, two things that I usually have trouble with. So here you are!
> 
> Can't say when the next chapter will be out, but please make note of the updated tags, those will be relevant soon. 
> 
> Enjoy~

Minghao remembered how the first time he heard the very first hell-beast growl, he and Junhui had been stunned into silence.

Now, growls were usually followed by a chorus of annoyed groans.

“Seriously?” Soonyoung griped as they turned to face the direction the sound had come from, all of them lifting their various weapons – bats for Mingyu and Soonyoung, the cursed knife for Minghao, with Junhui and Joshua extending their hands to Weave or Manifest if anything went wrong.  “This is the second one this week!”

The attacks had been getting more frequent.  In the weeks since Joshua’s joining their little band of magical misfits (and Mingyu), the hell-beasts had only increased in their intensity.  The others wouldn’t admit that they were coordinating it, but Minghao knew it couldn’t be coincidence that someone just always ‘ _happened_ ’ to be free to walk him from class to class, or to give him a ride from dance practice to the Maze late at night.

(One time it had been Wonwoo who appeared in the hall outside of his lecture, and Minghao had fixed him with a glare and complained, “You don’t even _go_ here.”

The witch had just shrugged and pushed up his glasses.  “No rule against visiting.”)

Part of Minghao wanted to complain – again – about not being a damsel in distress, but given how frequently the hell-beasts were attacking, he was actually grateful to usually have help in fending them off.

Case in point, this monster of the week - or more accurately the second one, as Soonyoung had pointed out.  It emerged from the woods on the side of the road that they’d been walking on, hissing and growling as its tail whipped back and forth.  This one was an…eagle?  Minghao leaned a bit to the side, squinting.  Eagle head, skeletal-looking lion-esque body, and torn-up bat wings.

What was with the lions?

“Gryphon,” Junhui said by way of explanation.  “Though the bat wings are just wrong.”

“Whatever,” Minghao grunted, twirling the knife in his hand, the hell-beast’s eyes following the movement.  “Come and get some, you ugly motherfuck,” he called out, and the thing pounced.

The group sprang into action with a quickness that had become habit.  Minghao ducked out of the way at the same time that Soonyoung and Mingyu jumped to either side of the hell-beast, bats swinging down and simultaneously striking the creature in its ribs.

Back when the whole ordeal had first started, that may have been enough to dispel the hell-beast, but they seemed to be getting stronger.  Instead of collapsing, it simply let out an ear-splitting shriek and spun around to face Minghao, ready to pounce again. 

It sprang forward, but the moment reversed itself and the creature reappeared in its original position.  At the same time, a series of ropes materialized in the air above it, dropping down and trapping the hell-beast in a makeshift net.  It wailed indignantly, thrashing back and forth and glaring as Minghao approached.

“We were on our way to _dinner_ ,” he heard Soonyoung complaining behind him.  “We were going to get _noodles_.  Is nothing sacred?”

“We can still go to dinner,” Joshua said soothingly.  “Let’s just dissolve it and keep walking.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Minghao said, and then stabbed the hell-beast between its eyes, right above the snapping beak.  The thing gave its loudest shriek yet, thrashes becoming weaker and weaker, until it finally lay still, the murderous flames dying from its eyes. 

They all stood staring at it for one, two seconds, and then Mingyu said, “Um, isn’t it supposed to dissolve now?”

Slowly, Minghao reached out with his foot and poked the hell-beast’s head.  It lolled to the side, tongue hanging out as blood seeped from where the knife was still plunged into its skull. 

“It’s definitely dead,” he said.

 “So why isn’t it dissolving?” Joshua asked, and Minghao didn’t have to look at the other to know that he was probably wringing his hands in concern. 

“They _have_ been getting harder to kill lately,” he heard Junhui mumble, and Minghao sighed before pulling the knife out of the hell-beast’s forehead and wiping it on the grass, muttering a silent apology to the blades as they complained. 

“Well, I guess we do with this what we do with anything we don’t understand.”

* * *

 

To Wonwoo’s credit, his only words when he opened the door and saw the five of them laboring under a giant gryphon corpse was, “Try not to get any blood on the furniture.”

Stumbling and swearing, they managed to haul the carcass into the apartment, dumping it on the living room floor.  It thumped heavily and lay motionless, staring at the ceiling with glassy eyes.

“So what happened?” Wonwoo called from the kitchen.  Minghao had a strong suspicion that he was probably dumping half a bottle of whiskey into the tea kettle.

“Thing attacked, we killed it but it didn’t dissolve,” Junhui called back, collapsing ungracefully onto the couch. 

“And we didn’t get _any_ noodles,” Soonyoung said. 

Wonwoo emerged from the kitchen, holding a steaming mug.  “Junhui has instant ramen in the far left cabinet.”

“Bless you, Wonwoo, you sweet and generous soul.”  Soonyoung jumped to his feet and all but darted into the kitchen, ignoring Junhui’s whine of protest.

Approaching the hell-beast corpse, Wonwoo nudged it with his foot, then looked back up at the group of them, tired and sweaty, perched around the living room.  “And why did you bring it here?”

Minghao shrugged.  “Figured you’d have some idea what to do with it.  Better than any of us, anyways.”

Another nudge, the hell-beast remaining completely unmoving. “Well,” Wonwoo said finally.  “I have absolutely no idea what this thing is.”

“No chance of it being a demon?” Junhui put in hopefully.

“None.  Whatever this thing is, it clearly was made of flesh and blood.”  As if on cue, the wound on the corpse’s forehead dribbled a bit, and Wonwoo wrinkled his nose.  “As you can see.”

“So what do we do, then?” Joshua asked from where he had sat down next to Junhui, much more gracefully with his hands folded in his lap.  “There has to be some sort of information we can get from this.”

Wonwoo was silent for a few moments, still staring at the hell-beast as he took a slow sip of whatever tea-and-whiskey concoction was in his mug.  “I suppose we could try a locator spell,” he said finally.  “I think I have one lying around somewhere.  It may not do much, but it could at least tell you guys where this thing came from.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Mingyu chirruped, smiling.  “Any information is better than nothing at all.”

Minghao nodded in agreement, feeling himself fiddling with the handle of the cursed knife where it was clipped to his jeans – something that had become a bit of a nervous habit.  “Given that I’m the one these things are targeting, I’m gonna say that anything that could possibly help is very much appreciated.”

He saw Wonwoo’s eyes flick towards him as the witch regarded him critically for a moment before nodding.  “Alright then, let’s try it.”

“Where’s the spell?” Mingyu asked.  His usual enthusiasm seemed remarkably undampened given the circumstances, as he hopped up and wandered over towards Wonwoo’s worktable.  “How does it work?”

Wonwoo, on the other hand, had seemingly made no other move than to pull out his phone.  “It’s an app.  I connected it to google maps.  This is the 21st century, you know.”

* * *

 

A half hour later found Minghao frowning down at the little pinging locator on his phone, then back up through the windshield of Mingyu’s minivan.  “This can’t be right.”

Behind him, he heard Junhui shift forward a bit from the backseat, leaning over the center console.  “I suppose it _could_ have come from here?” the other offered tentatively.

Minghao shook his head vehemently, gesturing at the house in front of them.  “Come on, look at it!  It’s like… _mockingly_ normal!”

Sure enough, the five of them were pulled over on the side of a cul-de-sac in what Minghao knew to be one of the more affluent parts of town.  The house where – according to the app – the gryphon had originated from was across the street, looking almost disturbingly average, in a very two-storied, cookie cutter way.  Like the kind of place where a white, middle-class family with two-and-a-half kids and a dog would live.

Soonyoung nudged Junhui out of the way to peer over Minghao’s shoulder at the phone. “Number 1034, Somnium Drive.  It’s definitely that one.”

“There must be more to it,” he heard Joshua say from the far back row.  “We can’t really judge by the outside of the house.”

Minghao spun around to stare at his TA, who was looking at number 1034 with a contemplative expression.  “Are you _seriously_ suggesting breaking and entering?”

Joshua flushed, the same way he did whenever Minghao pointed out that his Manifesting was basically thievery.  “Not _seriously_ , but just…putting it out there.”

“We’re not breaking in,” Mingyu said.

“We _could-_ ”

“No, we can’t.  Look, the owners just got home,” he said, pointing out the windshield.

Sure enough, a dark car – BMW, if Minghao wasn’t mistaken – had just pulled into the driveway of 1034, headlights reflecting in the windows for a second before they cut off.  Stillness, and then the driver’s door opened and a man in a suit stepped out. 

Behind him, he heard Soonyoung groan.  “Aw, damn, he looks just as bland as this house.”

“Don’t be rude,” Mingyu chided, but Minghao couldn’t help but agree.  The man had the same passive sort of face as Minghao imagined on every other middle-aged nine-to-five office worker.  Sandy blonde hair, nice suit, nice watch visible on his wrist even from the distance they were at. 

For a second, Minghao could have sworn that the man’s eyes flickered towards him, and was glad that they’d turned off the minivan’s ignition, so there was no way that the man could see inside. 

It was then that Minghao noticed someone else had gotten out of the car – a slightly shorter figure, a teenager probably, wearing a hoodie and carrying a backpack slung over their shoulder.  As the five of them watched silently, the man moved to rest a hand on the teenager’s shoulder, guiding them up towards the front door, where he stuck a key into the lock, pushed it open, and they went inside.  The door shut behind them, and Minghao imagined that he could hear the _snap_ across the night air.

As if planned, the five of them let out a collective breath.  “Well now what?” Junhui said, and Minghao didn’t have to look at him to know that he was probably chewing his thumbnail nervously.  “It’s just some guy and his kid.”

“We can’t just give up there,” Joshua said firmly.  “We’ll figure something out.  In the meantime, Minghao, didn’t you say you have to be home at nine?”

Minghao glanced at the clock on the dashboard, which read 8:47, and groaned.  “Yeah, I’m on Seungcheol duty tonight.”

He felt rather than saw the sympathetic look that Junhui was giving him as Mingyu started the van back up, pulling forward and out of the cul-du-sac.  “Is it any better at all?” he heard Junhui whisper, the other leaning forward a bit so that his words weren’t heard by the others.

Minghao just shook his head.  No, it wasn’t better at all.

* * *

 

Minghao paused in front of the door and took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself for what he was sure to find inside.  Shifting the tray with food onto one arm, he grasped the doorknob to the eldest Maze resident’s room and pushed it open.  “Hey, it’s me.  I’ve got dinner.”

Predictably, there was no response.  Seungcheol hadn’t spoken a word for almost three weeks at this point, so Minghao wasn’t sure why he was expecting any different.  

The room was silent as ever, and if Minghao hadn’t been able to see Seungcheol sitting upright on his bed, he might have guessed there was no one in there at all.  The psychic was totally still, eyes unblinking and unfocused.  Minghao wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.

With a sigh, he shut the door behind him and made his way inside, setting the tray down on the desk and pulling a chair up to the side of the bed.  Seungcheol made no acknowledgement that he was there, and truthfully, Minghao was pretty sure that Seungcheol really had no idea that there was anyone nearby. 

“Look, I don’t know what universe you’re in right now, but in this one Jeonghan said that you didn’t eat any breakfast, so you’re gonna have to wake up enough to eat some dinner.”

No response.  Minghao wondered what exactly Seungcheol was seeing right now, what future course of events he was lost in. 

He wondered if Jihoon was in it.

Shaking himself out of that rather melancholy thought, he grabbed the bowl of pasta off the tray and held it under Seungcheol’s nose, as if the smell of marinara might release him from the hold the Universe had taken on his mind.  “Come on, get up.”  _Don’t make me force feed you._

_Don’t even try it, kid._

Minghao almost fell off his chair at Seungcheol’s voice ringing in his head.  “Holy shit!” he gasped, just barely managing to save the bowl of pasta from spilling all over the other’s bedsheets.  “Are you awake?”

No response.  Minghao tried again.  _Are you awake?_

_No_.

_How are you talking to me, then?_

_I’m not_.  And wow, who knew that a mental voice could sound so grumpy?  _You’re talking to me._

Minghao eyed Seungcheol’s unmoving form doubtfully.  _Yeah, you’re the one with the weird psychic powers, man, not me.  This is clearly all you._

_Whatever._

The mental Seungcheol voice seemed perfectly fine with leaving the conversation at that, but Minghao wasn’t having it. _So where are you right now?_

_Year 3000. Not much has changed but we live underwater_.

_Okay, nice reference, but I’m serious.  You’ve got to wake up, Seungcheol, you can’t just let yourself go zoning off into wherever the Universe wants to take you for all eternity._

_Why not?  This is what it wants for me, clearly_.

Minghao scowled, feeling his patience wearing thinner with every word.  Or…thought, or whatever.  _You think this is what Jihoon wants for you?_

A stab of pain ripped through his mind, anguish taking hold of his heart for a second before it faded once more.  _It doesn’t matter what he wants for me.  He’s gone, and it’s for the best.  We all know that he deserves better than me._

_Where do you get off making him out to be some sort of saint?  This is_ Jihoon _we’re talking about.  He’s rude, angry about 95% of the time, and he has legitimately tried to murder Seokmin on at least three different occasions._

_He’s not really like that._  

The words were so soft, so tender, that for a moment Minghao was taken aback.  _What do you mean?_

_I mean… yes, he is rude and grumpy and he probably was actually trying to kill Seokmin.  But he cares so much about all of you, even if he doesn’t show it.  And he works harder than anyone else, and he feels things so deeply…_   For a moment, Minghao thought he saw Seungcheol’s already-glassy eyes shine with tears.  _I’ve hurt him too much.  He can find someone better._

The room was silent as Minghao considered that.  Realizing he was still holding the bowl of pasta, he set it down softly, the _click_ extra-loud in the quiet.  _Okay.  First of all, you are right that you’ve hurt him.  I’m not going to pretend that you two have been good to each other, because frankly you’ve both been terrible._ Before Seungcheol could reply, Minghao continued.  _But second of all, I don’t get why you think it’s your decision about who is ‘better’ for Jihoon.  In case you haven’t noticed, he clearly thinks all the same sappy stuff about you as you do about him._

There was no reply, but Minghao could tell that Seungcheol was still there, so he continued once more.  _I just don’t understand where you get off on denying yourself happiness.  You deserve it.  And fuck the Universe if it tells you otherwise_.

He heard Seungcheol chuckle drily.  _Usually not a good idea to say fuck the Universe, kid.  It’s always listening._

_Yeah, and apparently it wants me to be eaten by hell-beasts, so it can go screw itself.  I’m not about to let myself get controlled, and you shouldn’t either.  You’re a good person, Seungcheol.  You deserve better than that._

A moment’s silence, and then he heard Seungcheol draw in a shaky breath.  More importantly, he _saw_ it, the motionless figure in front of him twitching to life for an instant as its shoulders rose and fell.  _Thanks, kid,_ he heard Seungcheol whisper quietly in his mind.  _Not sure I believe that, but…thanks anyways._

The sense of sharing his head with someone else faded.  Moving with robotic slowness, the body in front of him extended a hand, palm upturned expectantly.  For a moment, Minghao stared at it in confusion, then remembered the bowl of pasta sitting next to him and quickly grabbed it, placing it into Seungcheol’s hand.  Eyes still unblinking and staring into the distance, his housemate pulled the bowl towards him and started to eat.

Minghao heaved a sigh of relief, leaning back in to his chair.  Maybe things were going to get better after all.

* * *

 

A few days later, they were hanging out in Wonwoo and Junhui’s apartment when Joshua burst through the door.  That in and of itself was unusual, given that Joshua was the only one of them who still knocked, but the level of wild enthusiasm on the usually composed man’s face was even more unusual.

“I did it!” he announced, waving a hand in the air.  It seemed to be holding something small and silver. 

“Did what?” Minghao asked, pushing himself upright from where he’d been laying on the couch, pretending to work on his soil science assignment.  There was only so long that irrigation could hold his attention, especially if there was something that promised more excitement available.  “Did you find something on Nephilim?”

“Gave me an A on my orgo homework?” Junhui piped up hopefully.

“Killed your PhD advisor?” Mingyu asked.

“Finally admitted that your Manifesting is interdimensional thievery?”

Joshua scowled at Wonwoo, who continued stirring the potion he was working on with remarkable unconcern.  “It is _not_.  And no, you’re all wrong.  I finally came up with something that can help us figure out how that hell-beast came from number 1043.”

There was a collective rush of excitement through the apartment as they all jumped up at once, crowding around the Manifest.  “What is it?”

In answer, Joshua opened up his hand.  There, in his palm, a little silvery moth lay quietly, antennae twitching as it looked up at them. 

“Aww!” Mingyu cooed.  “It’s so cute!  But, uh… how exactly is that going to help?”  Frankly, Minghao was right there with him.

“I Manifested it,” Joshua said, free hand reaching into his pocket and drawing out another, identical silvery moth.  “They’re not actually moths.  They’re tiny cameras connected to my phone.”

“No way,” Minghao said.  As he leaned forward, though, examining the two moths closely, he could see that the ‘eyes’ were little lenses, and the antennae made of shiny silver wire.

“Yes way,” Joshua replied.  He looked extremely proud of himself, and Minghao couldn’t really blame him.  “We can let them loose in 1034 and see what’s going on inside.  One for the upstairs, one for the downstairs.”

“That is 100% illegal,” Wonwoo pointed out drily, but he didn’t really sound as if he were disagreeing with the idea.

Joshua huffed.  “It’s not like we’ll get _caught_.  And none of you were up for breaking in, so this was the next best thing.”

The thought occurred randomly to Minghao that he should never, under any circumstances, allow Joshua and Jeonghan to meet.  

Belatedly, Minghao realized that the others were all looking to him, clearly waiting for him to make the decision since he was the one most affected by the situation.  Letting out a breath, he shrugged and said, “Hey, at least it’s better than breaking and entering.”

“I suppose it’ll be the best way to figure out if there is actually anything weird in that house,” Junhui said.  "I still think that the locator spell just messed up."              

Wonwoo shot him a poisonous look.  “There will be something weird, if the locator spell led you there.  My spells _always_ work.  I guarantee, the inside of that house is probably a lot more interesting than the outside.”

* * *

 

The inside of the house was just as boring as the outside.

“This is ridiculous,” Minghao muttered, as they watched the man – whose name they had discovered was Celestino Warren – talking on the phone with yet _another_ business partner.  It seemed to be all that dear old Celestino did, really.

Over the past few days, they’d set up a watch system.  1034 was empty during the day, so in the afternoon and evening they would take shifts to keep an eye on the house’s inhabitants once they got home, with Joshua’s phone propped up on the coffee table in Wonwoo and Junhui’s apartment.

To put in in simple terms, Minghao found Seungcheol’s coma watch more interesting than watching 1034.  From what they could tell, Celestino ran or was part of some type of for-hire business that provided people with…. Antiques? Rare objects?  Minghao hadn’t really figured it out as of yet.  Whatever it was, though, it seemed to govern Celestino’s whole life.  No sooner was he in the door than he had set himself down in front of his laptop, Bluetooth in ear and a coworker or client on the other side.

“If he mentions investors one more time,” Soonyoung said in a monotone from where he was laying upside-down on the couch, “I’m going to shoot myself.”

“You’re already dead,” Mingyu pointed out.

“Fine, then I’ll pick three random potions from Wonwoo’s table and drink them all.”

Wonwoo shot him a poisonous glare.  “Try it and I’ll kill you myself.  Somehow.”

“Not to mention you’d get higher than a monkey’s ballsack.”

Minghao shifted slightly where he was leaning his elbows on the coffee table to raise an eyebrow at Junhui.  “That made fuck all sense.”

The other pouted, and _yup_ , there was the heart flutter that Minghao somehow couldn't keep himself from feeling every time Junhui did something cute.  “Not my fault.  My brain is melting because of this guy.  How on earth can he make _espionage_ boring?”

“It’s not espionage, just eavesdropping,” Joshua retorted, but he sounded weary as well. 

Minghao sighed, dropping his head down onto his arms again.  “The kid awake?”

A tapping noise that he assumed was the camera being switched to Moth #2, and then Joshua said, “Yeah.  Still just sitting in his room.”

“Doing anything?”

“Drawing, I think.”

That was perhaps the only odd thing about the house – the kid.  From what Minghao could tell based on their – admittedly limited – view of him, he mostly appeared to be a perfectly normal teenager.  He went to school, came back, did his homework, went to sleep, and practically lived in ripped jeans and an oversized hoodie.  Minghao wasn’t even sure if they’d ever seen the kid change his outfit, to be honest. 

The weird thing was that they didn’t know his name.

As if on cue, Celestino’s voice echoed through the phone, muffled as it came through the kid’s closed door. 

_“Kid!  Get food at some point.”_  

“Does he always call him ‘kid’?” Mingyu wondered aloud, echoing Minghao’s thoughts.

Minghao nodded slowly.  “Yeah.  Never says his name or anything.  I still can’t figure out what the deal is with the two of them.”

Soonyoung shrugged, the motion causing him to slither a bit down the couch.  “Probably either his son or his younger brother or something.”

They fell silent for a moment, watching the phone screen.  The kid didn’t seem to act as if he had heard Celestino, pencil continuing to scratch quietly at the piece of paper he was bent over, but Celestino didn’t call for him again. 

“It’s weird, though.”

Minghao shifted to look up at Junhui.  “What’s weird?”

“The way the two of them interact.”  Jun was chewing on his thumbnail again, brows furrowed in concentration, and Minghao had to make a conscious effort to maintain focus on what was actually being said.  “They don’t ever really…talk, do they?  To each other.  Except when Celestino tells the kid to do something.”  Something about Junhui’s voice held the tone of someone grasping at the edge of a big realization. 

“Of course they must talk,” Mingyu was saying, but Junhui was already shaking his head.

“No, they don’t.  Think about it.  Celestino never asks about the kid’s homework, the kid never says good night before going to sleep.  They never even ask 'How are you?'”  In fact,” Junhui was on a roll now, eyes blazing as they all watched him with baited breath.  “Have we even heard the kid _speak_?”

Silence again, and then it was Joshua who slowly shook his head.  “No, you’re right.  Come to think of it, have we ever even seen his face?”

Sometimes it’s the most obvious things, the ones that take up a whole room, that are missed entirely.  Sometimes when something is too close to your nose, it’s almost impossible to see.  Minghao could feel the Universe again, dangling the conclusion right in front of them while they all went cross-eyed trying to get a look.

“It’s fake,” Junhui said finally.  “The inside of this house is a lie.”

A beeping noise echoed through the phone, causing them all to jump.  Joshua tapped the phone again, and the feed switched to Celestino on the couch.  His hand was up to the Bluetooth in his ear as he answered the call clearly coming in.

“‘Celestino Warren, how may I help you?’” Soonyoung said in a simpering tone, echoing the standard greeting they’d become familiar with over the past few days.

On the screen, though, Celestino was silent, face drawn and tense, hand still up to his ear.  Only his eyes moved, darting around the room.

A sudden fear gripped at Minghao’s chest, and he said, “Josh, hide the moth.”

He could see the others looking at him questioningly, but after a few moments Joshua tapped the screen again and the camera moved, cutting to black as the moth crawled behind a painting on the wall.

For a few moments there was no sound, apart from the gentle hum of static, and then Celestino’s voice came through, muffled by the painting but still clear enough to be heard.

“ _I told you not to call here.  It’s not secure._ ”

Minghao felt his eyes widen at the shift in tone.  Gone was the professional, business-like affability, and instead Celestino’s voice was tight with barely suppressed anger at whoever was on the other end.

_"I know it’s been six months, I’m fucking working on it, okay?  And it would be a lot easier if you weren’t constantly breathing down my neck.  The kid’s just a tough nut to crack.”_

So they were right, it was about the kid.  Minghao looked up at the others, who were all watching the blank phone with rapt attention.  The exception was Wonwoo, who bent over a notebook with a look of intense concentration, rapidly scribbling down Celestino’s words as he spoke.

_“Is that doubt I’m hearing?  You dare to doubt me right now?  I know what the fuck I’m doing, unlike_ some _people._ ”  A pause.  “ _Yes, the kid is vital.  We can’t get rid of him yet._ ”

“Chekov’s gun,” Junhui mumbled.

Minghao shot him a look.  “What?”

“Chekov’s gun.  That’s what your roommate said, that one day.”

_“You think I can’t handle some punk-ass teenager?”_

“But what does it mean?” Mingyu asked, looking up as well with an expression of confusion.

“ _I know what I heard them say._ ”

“It’s- ”

“ _They said Hansol has the Manifest, and the other one is in this fucking backwater town._ ”

They fell silent once more, all staring wide-eyed at the phone.  Then, as one, they turned to look at Joshua, who had gone absolutely white. 

“Josh?”  It was Mingyu who spoke first.  “What is he saying?  Who’s Hansol?”

“I… I…”  It was like the time that Joshua had first seen Soonyoung – he looked absolutely shaken to the core with terror, words stumbling out of his mouth and hands wringing desperately in front of him.  “I don’t know.  I… I used to have a younger cousin named Hansol, but he…  They said he was most likely dead… “

“They?” Minghao pried, impatience making his voice sharper than he would have intended.  “Who’s they?”

There were tears welling at the corners of Joshua’s eyes now.  “The lawyers… There was a break-in, and… And my aunt and uncle were killed, but Hansol disappeared and they said… “

“When was this?”

A blink, then realization slowly dawning.  “Six months ago.”

It was Wonwoo who said the words that they were all slowly reaching.  “You said before that Manifesting is a genetic trait, like Weaving.” 

“Chekov’s gun,” Junhui mumbled again.

“What is Chekov’s gun, though?” Mingyu repeated, at the same time that Minghao said, “Josh, switch back to Moth 2.” 

Joshua seemed unable to move, still staring at the phone screen with a mixture of grief and terror.  Letting out a huff of impatience, Minghao grabbed the phone himself and tapped it, trying to remember how Josh had controlled the cameras before.

Meanwhile, Junhui was talking again.  “Chekov’s gun is a literary device that…  Well, actually it was originally meant for plays, and the adaptation to literature has been misused according to some people- ”

“Jun.” 

“Right, sorry.  Chekov said that if you place a gun onstage in Act One, you need to make sure that it goes off in Act Two.  Nothing should have attention drawn to it unless it will be involved later on.”  Junhui blinked, then turned towards Minghao.  “Hey, wasn’t your housemate with someone that day?”

“Huh?”  Minghao was still trying to work the MothCam.  His thumb finally seemed to hit the correct button, and the feed switched from pitch black to the view of the kid’s messy room once more.  The kid himself had moved to sitting on his bed, knees drawn up and head in his arms.  Realizing that Junhui was still waiting for an answer, he replied, “Uh, yeah, I think so.”

“What was his name?”

Why was Junhui pushing this so hard?  Minghao huffed again as he tapped the screen a few more times, trying to get the moth closer to the kid.  Miraculously, it seemed to listen, and began crawling along the wall towards the unmoving teenager.

“Hao.”  Something about the tone of Junhui’s voice actually caught his attention, and Minghao looked up, at the same time that Junhui leaned forward and placed a hand on his wrist.

Somehow, Minghao’s incredibly gay brain managed to zero in on that fact despite the sense of urgency in the room.  

“Hao, this is important,” Junhui stressed.  His eyes were blazing again, and Minghao was having trouble looking away.  “What was his name?”

What had been that kid’s name?  Slowly, it came trailing up from his memory.  “Vernon,” he said.  “Why?”

At that moment, a sound – the tiniest sigh – echoed from the phone, and they all turned their attention to it, just in time to see the teenager raise his head, giving them the first clear look at his face.

“Because he’s the gun,” Junhui said, at the same time that Joshua gasped and choked out, “That’s him!  That’s Hansol!”

For a few seconds, they sat in stunned silence, watching as the boy – Hansol, Vernon, _the kid_ – sighed again, and then lay down and pulled the comforter up over his head.  Minghao couldn’t speak for the others, but he felt as if the puzzle they’d been struggling to fit together was rapidly starting to fall into place, but the picture it painted was uglier than any of them could have imagined. 

There was only a couple of pieces left.

“Hansol has the Manifest,” he said slowly, echoing Celestino’s words from earlier.  “That’s what he said.” 

“And 1034 is where the hell-beasts are coming from,” Junhui said, as if to finish Minghao’s thought. 

Joshua sprang up from his chair suddenly, making an aborted motion as if he were about to head for the door, before turning and pacing towards the window instead.  His hands were still twisting over and over in front of him, but the energy was more nervous now than before.  Minghao shared a look with Jun, and then opened his mouth, but to his surprise it was Soonyoung who spoke instead. 

“Is it possible to Manifest something alive?”

He sounded uncharacteristically serious.  A quick glance, and Minghao realized that Soonyoung was no longer goofily lying upside-down on the couch, but was standing and had fixed Joshua’s back with a blank stare. 

Joshua didn’t answer at first, nor did he turn to face them.  One hand came up to grip the windowsill, and even across the room Minghao could see how his knuckles had turned white.  “It’s not supposed to be.”

“I didn’t ask if it was supposed to be, I asked if it is possible.”  Soonyoung’s voice still held no trace of emotion, but there was something in his eyes that made Minghao think that his friend somehow already had the answer to the question.

“Soonyoung, what- ”  Soonyoung held up a hand to silence him, and Minghao bit his tongue, glancing back at Joshua again.

The Manifest still hadn’t moved.  Finally, he whispered.  “It’s possible.  I can’t tell you how I know, but it is possible.”

This time Minghao couldn’t hold it in.  “Can’t tell us?” he burst out, feeling his hands balling into fists at his sides.  He understood that Joshua was clearly going through some sort of emotional whirlwind given that he’d just found out his supposedly-dead cousin was actually alive, but _still_.  “This is my fucking _life_ on the line here with these hell-beasts!  If you’ve been holding out information on us this whole time, Josh, that’s gonna be a problem.”

“It wasn’t relevant,” Joshua shot back, though he still did not turn around.  “At least, I didn’t think it was relevant…”  The _until now_ went unsaid.

“So tell us!”

“I can’t.”  Minghao saw his hands shake.  “You’ll hate me.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”  Minghao could feel his patience thinning with every passing second. 

“We won’t hate you, Josh,” Mingyu said quietly.  “You’re our friend.”

Joshua shook his head.  “I did something wrong.  Something that affects all of you, but I swear I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did,” he added, desperation palpable in his voice.  “I didn’t know, and it was so many years ago…”

“I remember.” 

It was Soonyoung who had spoken, in that same monotone as before, and that seemed to be the trigger that caused Joshua to finally turn around, eyes wide and fixed on Soonyoung. 

“I remember now,” Soonyoung repeated, face completely blank.  “It’s fine.  Go ahead and tell them.”

Minghao could feel his own breath catching in his throat as Joshua stared despairingly at the dead boy who’d spoken, as if pleading for mercy without words.  Apparently finding none, he took a deep breath and dropped his gaze to the floor.

“Tell them now,” Soonyoung said.  “Tell them how you know that it’s possible to Manifest something alive.”

Joshua’s eyes flickered upwards, head still bowed in submission, and he said:

“Because I Manifested Soonyoung.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting into it now, folks. Two more chapters and an epilogue, and then this story is wrapped up. 
> 
> (There may or may not be a bts-centric sequel in the works, but you didn't hear that from me)
> 
> As always, kudos and comments are much appreciated <3


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snow day means a day I don't have to go to work or attend any of my other responsibilities, which means I get to finish a chapter!
> 
> I would apologize for the cliffhanger at the end of the previous chapter, but that's actually been one of the first plot points I came up with back when this story was just a wee idea in my brain almost 2 years ago, so I really can't. Your reactions made my day, tbh <3
> 
> A lot of Very Important stuff is about to happen in my life, so I don't know when the next chapter will be out, but in the meantime, enjoy~

_Before_ :

“Joshua, come downstairs!  Your father and I are heading out soon!”

“I _know_ , Mom!” he yelled, before turning his attention back to the mirror.  This was a cool outfit, right?  Hoodie with the x-men symbol on it, ripped jeans… would adding a hat be weird, considering that he was in his own house?

“Joshua, downstairs!  Now!”

"In a minute!”  The hat would be too much, he decided.  It was cool as it was. 

Soonyoung would think it was cool, anyways.

“Joshua Hong, get your butt downstairs right now, young man!  Soonyoung’s here!”

Eyes widening, he jolted into motion, practically tripping over a book laying on the floor as he ran out of his bedroom.  Stumbling down the stairs, he paused at the bottom landing to collect himself for a moment before casually walking the last few feet towards the front door.  Best not to look to eager.  That wasn’t cool.

In the entryway, Soonyoung was toeing off his shoes while nodding politely to Joshua’s mom, who was hurriedly putting on her coat and double-checking her purse.

“There’s leftovers in the fridge, the cat’s been fed, and your mother is home tonight, right dear?”

“Yes, she’s just next door,” Soonyoung replied.  “I can run over and get her in case of an emergency.”

“Okay, good.  Remember to put Josh to bed by nine.” 

“Of course,” he said, but Joshua saw the wink Soonyoung sent him when his mother turned around to look for her keys, and bit his lip to keep from giggling out loud. 

_After nine is cool kid hours,_ Soonyoung had told him before.  _So you can stay up till at least ten._

_Is that cause I’m ten years old?_ Joshua had asked.  Soonyoung had laughed and said, _Yeah, wait till your birthday.  Then you can stay up till eleven if you want._

“Okay, I think that’s everything,” Joshua’s mom was saying.  In an ideal world she would have just left then, but instead she chose to bend down and press a wet kiss to Joshua’s forehead.  He recoiled instantly, wiping away the lipstick and whining _Moooom, stop_. 

“You be good, okay?” she said.  He nodded, and a smile curled her lips.  “I love you.”

Casting a surreptitious glance over at Soonyoung, who luckily didn’t seem to be paying attention, Joshua muttered back, “Love you too,” ignoring the embarrassment he could feel burning at his cheeks.

Straightening up, his mother waved to Soonyoung, said “Call me if you need anything,” and then stepped out the door.  It shut with a _snap_ , then after a few seconds the sound of her keys turning in the lock echoed through the entryway.

Joshua looked up at Soonyoung, who grinned down at him.  “So. Mario Kart?”

He felt himself grin back in return.  “You're on.”

(Later that evening, they were talking about the neighborhood dinner their families had hosted a few weeks ago and Soonyoung casually said, “You know, it was pretty amazing how much work my mom put into it.  She’s really cool, and I love her a lot.”

(Joshua didn’t say anything back, but when his mom called at 8:45 to check if he was getting ready for bed – which he wasn’t – he responded to her _I love you_ with a _love you too, mom!_   Not mumbled, but loud and cheerful, and he could see Soonyoung smiling at him for it.)

* * *

 

_Then:_

Over the next few years, Joshua really started to love summers.  Because not only did it mean that he didn’t have to go to school every day, but it meant that Soonyoung was back from college.

Joshua was starting to get more and more of an idea about what college was as they started bringing it up regularly during class – previously it had just been the place where his parents worked.  But he wasn’t so sure he liked it, given that it kept Soonyoung away for most of the year.

“I don’t understand why you had to go so far, though,” he whined, trailing behind Soonyoung as they made the walk along the two-lane road that went to his parents’ workplace.  Well, not their workplace _exactly_ – neither of them worked in the dance department, and he knew that was Soonyoung’s end goal.  “There’s a college right here in town, and you’re always using their studios.  How come you didn’t just go here?”

Soonyoung laughed, spinning around and walking backwards for a moment so that he could reach out to ruffle Joshua’s hair.  He didn’t have to reach as far down to do it as he had last summer, Joshua noticed with no small amount of satisfaction.  “Kid, I’ve lived in this place my entire life.  It was high time for a change of scenery.  No offense, but there’s not much happening in this little backwater town.”

“Sure there is,” Joshua insisted, but even as he said it he was casting around in his mind for possible attractions to list.  “There’s the movie theater, and that really good noodle place on Main Street.”

“They have movies and noodles in New York too.”

What didn’t they have in New York?  “Well, how about that big empty house on Cardamom Way?  The really crazy one that everyone says is haunted.  That would be super fun to explore!  Bet they don’t have that anywhere else.”

Soonyoung snorted.  “Is that what you middle schoolers get up to these days?  Besides,” he added as they turned the corner, the college gates rising into sight.  “Didn’t you hear?  The lady that owns it is apparently moving her nephew in or something.  Dude just got out of the nuthouse, they say.  So I wouldn’t go breaking in there anytime soon if I were you.”

“But everyone you know is here,” he countered, speeding up his steps a bit so that he was walking alongside Soonyoung instead of behind him.  A bit precarious given how that put him in the road, but worth it, in his opinion.  There were hardly every any cars coming in and out of the college during summer, anyways.  “Your parents, your friends, and me!” 

“Aw, love you too, kid,” Soonyoung replied cheekily, which left Joshua sputtering indignantly, because if there’s one thing thirteen-year-old boys hate, it’s the _love_ word.  “But life’s too short to stay in one place, you know.  Time is fleeting, never know what’s around the riverbend, yada yada.”

Joshua eyed him mulishly as they reached the arts building.  It was technically locked for the summer, but there was one side door where if you jiggled it _just so_ it would pop open – as Soonyoung easily demonstrated.  “Stop talking like you’re old,” Joshua muttered as he followed the other into the building.  “You’re twenty.”

“Twenty, twenty-two, thirty-five, doesn’t make a difference.  _Carpe diem_ , dude,” Soonyoung said.  They reached a dance studio and he flicked on the lights, which illuminated the space one by one with fluorescent intensity.  Dropping his bag, Soonyoung lifted an arm up behind his head and asked, “You in the mood to dance today, or you just gonna watch?”

“I’ll watch,” Joshua decided.  He was feeling a bit sullen and not in the mood to do much of anything, which was unfortunate given that Soonyoung would be leaving again in a few weeks.  He ought to make the most of his time. 

Then again, he decided as he settled down against the mirror and watched Soonyoung move from stretching to putting on music and starting to practice different routines, watching Soonyoung dance wasn’t exactly a waste of time.  It was more a spectacle than anything else. 

He supposed that fancy New York school Soonyoung was going to was worth it, if it meant his friend got to dance and smile like that. 

The last song came to an end, and Joshua clapped a few times as Soonyoung’s motion came to a halt, the older boy panting loudly in the middle of the room.  “Naega Hosh!” he cheered, only half sarcastic as he struck the pose he was accustomed to seeing the other doing.

The silliness was worth it, since Soonyoung looked over at him with a grin splitting his face, eyes disappearing as he smiled.  “Hey, don’t make fun now, it’ll catch on.”

“Why a stage name, though?” Joshua asked, pulling his knees up and wrapping his arms around them.  “What’s wrong with Soonyoung?”

“Hoshi’s catchier.”

“If you say so.”  A pause, then he added, “You gonna put on another song now?”

Soonyoung seemed to consider it for a moment, then winced and sucked in a deep breath.  For a moment, his hand drifted up to his chest, the motion so brief that Joshua almost didn’t notice it.  “Nah, think we’d better call it quits here for today.”

“Huh?”  Joshua blinked.  “But we just got here like, fifteen minutes ago.”

“Yeah, I’m not feeling too hot.”  Soonyoung looked back up at him, and the grin was back, as if it had never left.  “Nothing for you to worry about though, kid.  Come on, let’s see if your mother will make us some dinner.”

* * *

 

_Later:_

Suits were stupid, Joshua decided.  He was right at the age where his body parts were growing at different speeds and only just starting to get the idea that hey, maybe they should match up with each other, so the suit pinched and choked at all the wrong places.  He’d only had to wear one once before, for his uncle’s wedding, but he’d been having fun and also seven years old at the time, so he hadn’t cared much.

Fun was the furthest thing from what he was having now, so he’d decided that suits were stupid. 

He was pretty sure Soonyoung didn’t like suits anyways.  Soonyoung liked clothes you could move in.

Had liked clothes you could move in.

So yeah.  The suit was stupid.

There were also too many people, he had decided.  He’d spent nearly as much time in this house as he had his own over the past fifteen years, and he’d never seen it this full.  There were people _everywhere_ – in the kitchen, in the living room, up and down the stairs, all wearing dark clothes, talking in sad, low voices and eating tiny plates of cheese and vegetables from a platter. 

Joshua had never been to a wake before, so he just assumed that was the normal atmosphere of one. 

He wandered through the rooms with the vague intention of finding someone he knew.  There were lots of people he sort of knew – the high school dance teacher, the neighbor who lived across the street, that girl Soonyoung had dated for a bit when he was in twelfth grade – but he didn’t particularly want to interact with any of them. 

Eventually he found himself in the kitchen with his mother’s back in his sights.  Without even thinking about it, he started to scoot his way through the crowd towards her, absentmindedly noting that she seemed to be talking to one of her fellow professors at the college.  It was only when he got a bit closer that he was able to make out the words, and heard his own name being dropped.

“Obviously it’s terrible, but if it had to happen, I’m just glad it was before we moved,” she was murmuring, her coworker nodding in solemn agreement.  “I can’t imagine what it would have been like for Joshua if we were already in LA and couldn’t get back for the funeral.  They were so close, you know, and this is already such a turbulent time for him, with the move and the- ”  She caught herself, and instead said “He’s at an age, is what I mean.”  Joshua knew what she’d been about to say, but the very first thing his father had said was _You cannot tell anyone_. 

Joshua hadn’t told anyone yet, but he’d been going to tell Soonyoung, when Soonyoung got back for the summer.  He and Soonyoung didn’t have secrets.

Except, apparently, they had.

He’d had to google ‘Congenital Heart Defect’.  The internet hadn’t been too specific – it seemed like there were a lot of variations, and he didn’t know which one exactly he was looking for – but one thing that it had said was that it was present since birth.  Which meant – and Soonyoung’s mother had confirmed this later – that Soonyoung had known.  And he hadn’t said anything to Joshua.  He’d kept smiling and gone to his fancy New York School and kept dancing even though that probably hadn’t helped at all, because it was what he loved to do.  And that was so Soonyoung that Joshua couldn’t even really be mad at him for it.

Joshua’s mother finally seemed to realize that he was standing behind her, and she turned around quickly, shooting an apologetic smile to her friend.  “Hey, you okay honey?” she asked, immediately stepping in closer and lowering her voice.  He nodded, and she continued, “How about the…” and cast a meaningful glance down at his hands.

Personally, Joshua thought the whole glowing-eyes thing was weirder than anything his hands did when Manifesting.  But he guessed that wouldn’t have conveyed as well.

“It’s fine,” he said.  “I’ve got it under control.”

More importantly, he had an idea that was going to show just how much control he had.

* * *

 

The classroom was empty.  Reasonable, given that it was a Saturday.  Normally Joshua would have never stepped foot in his high school on a weekend, but he needed a place where he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.

It hadn’t been too difficult to get his Mom to let him go off on his own.  They were leaving the next day, after all, so he’d told her he wanted to walk around the town one last time.  She’d believed him and let him go, but that may have been just because she’d been very lenient with him since Soonyoung…

Well.  That was why he was here, after all.

He knew that what he was doing would definitely get him in trouble if either of his parents found out.  The very second thing his father had said, after _don’t tell anyone_ , was “You cannot Manifest something alive.  Do not even try.” 

He wasn’t going to Manifest something alive though, he reasoned.  He was going to Manifest someone who was dead, to bring them _back_ to life.  It was logical, really. 

He’d figure out how to get Soonyoung to LA later.  Right now, the important thing was getting him back on this plane of existence. 

It wouldn’t be easy, that was for sure.  Joshua had been practicing regularly for the last three months since he’d developed his powers, and thus far the biggest thing he’d managed to Manifest had been a stuffed bear.  It had been a _big_ stuffed bear, though, so he could manage Soonyoung, no problem. 

After all, no one knew Soonyoung better than Josh. 

“Okay,” he muttered to himself, pushing up his sleeves and stretching out his hands towards the front of the room.  The teacher’s desk was there, Soonyoung could sit down if he was dizzy coming back from…wherever he was.  “Let’s do this.”

He closed his eyes.  “Focus,” he whispered.  _Focus on everything about Soonyoung, every little detail you need to get right…_

He felt warmth tingling in his fingertips, felt his eyes shake slightly even behind his tightly closed eyelids as they started to glow.  Everything about Soonyoung – height, hair, eyes that closed when he smiled, hamster cheeks, loved to dance…

He could hear… _something_ happening in the front of the room.  A gap being torn, something taking shape as it was pulled through.  It was hard, though, more difficult than anything that Joshua had manifested before – he could feel resistance, the thing trying to pull away from the gap. 

“C’mon…”  Brows furrowing in concentration, Joshua bowed his head, feeling the warmth in his hands grow to a heat that was starting to become uncomfortable.  “Don’t be like this Soonyoung, get over here!”

_Things about Soonyoung, things about Soonyoung_ ….

_Dance, jokes, cheerful, silly…_

_Dead._

No, wait, he shouldn’t have thought that! 

Joshua’s eyes flew open, and at the same time he felt the thing give up its last resistance and fall through the gap, landing in the front of the room. 

The Universe sewed itself shut, and Joshua was left panting with hands extended, staring at Soonyoung where he was flopped over the teacher’s desk.

Wait.  That wasn’t Soonyoung.

Was it?

The Not-Soonyoung raised his head, and there was something just ever so slightly… _off_ about him.  He looked _just like_ Soonyoung, at least Joshua thought so, and yet…

_That’s the problem,_ his brain whispered, and an icy chill ran down his back as it occurred to him for the first time that this may not have been a good idea.  _He looks like what_ you _think Soonyoung looked like.  But there’s only so much you can remember of someone else’s face._

Not-Soonyoung looked around for a few seconds, seeming disoriented, before his gaze fell on Joshua, standing motionless in the center of the room.  The two stared at each other, then Soonyoung broke out into a grin, and it was _exactly_ how Joshua remembered.  For the most fleeting of moments he felt a spark of relief, that he hadn’t messed it up, that he’d gotten it right, and then the other opened his mouth and said, “Hi, I’m Soonyoung!  And I’m dead!  What’s your name?”

_No._

The words hit Joshua with a physical force, sending him recoiling as he stumbled back a few steps, landing against one of the desks.  “You… you don’t know me?”  He managed to croak out, voice shaking and echoing in the empty room.

Not-Soonyoung tilted his head to the side, expression turning contemplative.  “Should I?  You do look a little familiar, but I can’t seem to remember anything.  Probably because I’m dead.” 

Slowly, not even fully realizing what he was doing – his brain seemed to have gone completely offline, full only of static and a sense of _wrong, wrong, wrong, you failed –_ Joshua shook his head.  Jerky, back and forth.  “No.  You don’t know me.”

“Oh.”  Not-Soonyoung seemed to accept this, looking around the room instead.  “You mind telling me how I got here, then?” 

“I- ”  What was he supposed to say?  _I tried to bring my best friend back from the dead, but I think I accidentally brought a stranger instead_.

Not-Soonyoung tilted his head to the side, an expression of concern flitting across his familiar-yet-unfamiliar face.  “Hey, you okay kid?  You’re looking kind of - ”

And then he was gone. 

No flash of light, no _pop_.  Just one second there, the next…nothing. 

A shaky breath entered Joshua’s lungs as his legs finally seemed to give out from under him, and he sank down to his knees, head falling naturally into his hands.  He hadn’t been strong enough.  The Manifestation had vanished, gone back to whatever dimension he’d pulled it from.

Probably for the best, considering how much he’d fucked it up.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Joshua didn’t have to look to know that it was almost definitely his mother asking him to come back to the house and finish packing his things. 

Taking another deep breath, Joshua slowly pushed himself to his feet and made his way out of the classroom.  At least they were leaving tomorrow.  He could leave this town and his mistake – however temporary it had been – behind for good.

(And yet ten years later, he was standing in an apartment in that very same town, forced to retell the entire disaster to his five friends, one of whom happened to be that very mistake.)

* * *

 

_Now_ :

The second that Joshua stopped talking, Soonyoung vanished. 

Minghao stared at the spot where his best friend had been standing for a few moments before rounding on Joshua, feeling rage bubbling up from his chest and exploding into the first words he could think of.

“What the fuck, Josh?  It’s _your_ fault he’s like this?!”

He heard Jun inhale sharply beside him, but Joshua simply bowed his head in apparent acquiescence.

“Yes.  I didn’t know any better, and I thought that… well, I didn’t think he had _lasted_.  That was the only reason I even came back here for my PhD program.  I was so certain that there wouldn’t be any trace of what I’d done.”

The words did nothing to quell Minghao’s anger – if anything, it doubled.  “Don’t talk about him like that.”

Joshua looked up again, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.  “Like what?”

“Like he’s a _thing_ you made!” Minghao spat.  “He’s not your fucking MothCam, Josh, he’s a full fucking person and he’s my best friend.  I don’t care what your intentions were when you brought him over here, he’s not _yours_.  You don’t get to talk about him like he’s not real.”

He could see the shock in Joshua’s eyes, feel Junhui’s hand closing gently around his wrist.  To put it frankly, though, Minghao did not give one flying fuck.  Maybe the past Soonyoung had been Joshua’s best friend, but this Soonyoung was _his_ , and he would defend him no matter what.

“I-“

“Guys.”  Mingyu’s voice interrupted whatever Joshua had been about to say.  “Guys, come look at this.”

Minghao turned around to see that Mingyu and Wonwoo were both bent over the MothCam – he’d completely forgotten that they’d left the feed of 1034 on.  Specifically, the screen of Joshua’s phone was focused on Vernon’s room.  The teenager was still in bed, and it looked like he’d fallen asleep, hoodie and all.  As Minghao moved closer, though, peering over Wonwoo’s shoulder, he realized that the rest looked anything but peaceful.  Small, terrified whimpers echoed through the phone’s speaker as the teenager shivered in bed, curling into an even tighter ball beneath the sheets.

“Look,” Mingyu said, and his finger pointed not at Vernon, but at the seemingly empty floor next to the bed, where the air had started to bubble.

That was the only word for it, really.  It looked like a pot of water boiling, the seemingly vacant space warping and twisting around itself, slowly coalescing into a solid form that grew rapidly in size.

The newest hell-beast, another giant snake, landed with a _thump_ as the boiling rapidly stopped.   It raised its head, nostrils flaring, and Minghao saw that the face was actually that of a dragon.  The mouth cracked open, steam hissing from between its fangs, and then the creature slithered across the floor and out the open window, tail flicking in the air as it fell from view.

Dimly, Minghao remembered Joshua mentioning how difficult Manifesting was, and how the larger the object, the more difficult it was to pull through.  And yet Vernon was apparently regularly pulling huge, _alive_ hell-beasts over from another dimension in his sleep.

He remembered Joshua calling himself ‘weak’.  It looked like they now knew what a strong Manifest could do.

“Think that’s going to show up here in a few minutes?”

Mingyu’s question was interrupted by a muffled yell echoing from the phone, a few crashes, and then silence.  Onscreen, Vernon tensed and then shot up in his bed, eyes wide and panicked.  No sooner had he done so that footsteps came pounding up towards the door, and then it swung open, revealing a frazzled-looking Celestino.  His usually impeccable blonde hair was ruffled, his chest was heaving, and there was a thin cut on his cheek.

Minghao glanced around quickly at the others, to see if they were thinking the same thing as him.  “Did _he_ just fight the hell-beast?”  In what universe did the most ordinary human alive – Celestino Warren – fight and apparently defeat a hell-beast in less than ten seconds flat? 

More importantly, why did he look more angry than surprised?

Celestino’s eyes fixated on Vernon, who had suddenly gone very still in his bed, head bowed and face covered by his hoodie.  “ _Alright, kid,_ ” Celestino panted.  There was nothing left of the genial businessman – there was something almost deranged in the intensity of his expression.  “ _Enough games. I know you’ve got it.  Where is the Manifest?_ ”

_The fuck?_   Minghao blinked, more than a little confused, but Junhui sucked in a quick breath to his right.  “He doesn’t know,” the other said, the words rushing out with the speed of realization.  “He doesn’t realize that the Manifest is a person, he thinks it’s a thing.”

A trickle of fear ran down Minghao’s spine, the severity of the situation slowly revealing itself.  “And he thinks that Vernon knows where it is.” 

Onscreen, Vernon hadn’t moved.  Finally, his lips parted, and he rasped out, “ _I don’t know what that is._ ”

It was clearly the wrong answer.

Within two seconds, Celestino was across the room, hand grasping the teenager’s chin as he jerked his head upwards.  There was no gentleness in the motion, and Minghao could see the whiteness of the man’s knuckles and the way his nails dug into Vernon’s skin.

“Everyone else is seeing this, right?” he heard Mingyu whisper, no small amount of panic in the other’s voice.  “I’m not the only one seeing this.”

“ _Six months_ ,” Celestino seethed.  Vernon remained motionless, not even struggling to get out of the man’s grasp.  “ _Six months we’ve been in this backwater town, all because your fucking_ father _said the other Manifest was here, and yet you haven’t even told me where the first one is._ ”

There was an odd, choked noise from behind them.  Minghao glanced over his shoulder to see that Joshua was standing a few feet away, hand over his mouth and tears welling up in his eyes, and the anger Minghao had felt at his friend a few minutes before fell away rapidly as he remembered that _oh right,_ Vernon was apparently Joshua’s _cousin_.  Which meant that it was his family being discussed right now, one of whom was dead and the other apparently in the home of someone with absolutely no good intentions.

“ _I’m sick of this fucking place.  It’s absolutely_ crawling _with freaks, there’s no trace of the Manifest anywhere, and then all these fucking_ creatures _start popping up as well._ ”  Seemingly changing tactics, Celestino grinned suddenly, leaning a bit closer towards the teenager’s face.  “ _You think you can hide anything from me, kid?  I’m in your head, you know.  I know everything that goes on in there, and I could make things oh-so-very painful for you._ ”  A finger of his free hand came up, poking at Vernon’s temple through the material of his hood.  “ _Wanna watch your parents die again?  I can make it extra bloody this time_.”

“What the hell is he saying?” Minghao heard himself whisper.  But it didn’t really matter that none of them understood exactly what Celestino was saying, because the implications and intention were clear.  Joshua made another choked noise, this one more identifiable as a sob.

“ _All of it can be over,_ ” Celestino crooned.  “ _Just tell me where your Manifest is, and where the other one your dear old dad mentioned as well.  And then I’ll put you out of your misery._ ”

For a moment, there was absolute silence.  Minghao could feel the tension radiation through the phone screen, resonating between the five of them watching with wide, terrified eyes.

_“I don’t know_.”

_SMACK_

Minghao heard someone gasp – maybe Junhui, maybe Mingyu, maybe himself – as Vernon fell back onto the bed, hand flying up towards his cheek. 

“ _Tsk_.”  Celestino spun away, stalking back towards the door.  “ _I’m done with this shit.  We’re leaving next week._ ”  He shot one last poisonous glance at Vernon, who hadn’t moved from where he fell.  “ _I have people who will make you talk_.”

The door slammed behind him.  After a solid ten seconds, the tiniest of sighs echoed through the phone, and Vernon slowly shifted to slide under his bedsheets again, going motionless within minutes.

 “We have to get him out of there.”

It was Joshua who spoke, and as Minghao turned to face him he saw that while there were still tear tracks down the other’s cheeks, his hands were bunched into fists and there was a look of barely-concealed rage flashing in his eyes.  “We have to get him out of there.  Right now.”

“We need to think about- ”

“There’s no time to think!”  The yell was explosive, and Minghao actually felt himself take a step back in response.  None of them had ever seen Joshua like this – there was a wildness to him that, in retrospect, had always been boiling under the surface, but now it was coming out full force.  It was suddenly easy to imagine him impulsive enough of a child to try and bring someone back to life.  “That’s my _family_ , and that man has been torturing him for months, and you’re telling me I need to _think_?  We need to go in there and-”

“No one is going in that house,” Wonwoo said, and it was spoken with such calm authority that Minghao was almost surprised when Joshua didn’t immediately calm down, but instead rounded on the witch with fury sparking from his eyes.

“The _hell_ we’re not-”

“No one is going in that house,” Wonwoo repeated, and this time he stood up and fixed Joshua with a steely glare.  “ _Especially_ you, Joshua.  That man is after Manifests, did you forget?  You want to walk right into his hands?”               

It was a killer point, and Minghao saw how Joshua’s shoulders slowly slumped in acquiescence. 

Wonwoo continued talking, now addressing all of them.  “I don’t know who or what exactly this man is, but it’s clear that he is more than we assumed at first.  There is something _exceedingly_ dangerous about him, and I would highly advise all of you stay as far away as possible, given that you are individuals in possession of a unique ability that I can guarantee he would probably covet if he knew about them.  Except you, Mingyu.  Sorry,” he added at the end.

Mingyu raised his hands up in surrender.  “Hey, I’m totally cool with not being a target for Mr. Crazy Businessman, thanks.”  He tilted his head then, and added, “Is that what his business is, do you think?  Dealing magic people and things?”

“It probably is.”

“So we can’t just leave Hansol with him!” Joshua burst out again.  “If Celestino figures out he’s a Manifest he’ll either use him or sell him to some other shady creepy who will want to use his powers!”

An idea occurred to Minghao, and his hand shot out to grab Junhui’s wrist.  “Seungkwan.”

Junhui shot a confused look down at the hand on his wrist, then up at Minghao.  “No, I’m Junhui.”

“I-  That’s not what I meant!” he groaned, using his free hand to punch the other’s shoulder and ignoring Junhui’s yelp of protest and subsequent (cute, not that there was any time to notice it was cute, but still cute) pout.  “We first saw Vernon because he was working on a project with Seungkwan, remember?  My housemate.”

“Oh.  Yeah, we did.  So?”

“ _So_ , they go to school together.  Which means that Celestino obviously lets Vernon out of his sight long enough for him to go to class.  We can ask Seungkwan to arrange for us to meet Vernon at their high school, and avoid Celestino completely.”

Junhui hummed thoughtfully, eyes still on where Minghao’s hand was around his wrist.  “That could work.  Should we call him?”

"No, he’s at the Maze but he and Jeonghan are doing readings today, so he won’t have his phone on him.  Let’s just go there.”

“You two go, we’ll stay on MothCam watch,” Mingyu said, and Minghao saw that the other had gotten up to put a comforting arm around Joshua’s shoulders.  It looked as if now that the rage had drained out of him, the eldest of them was starting to go into some sort of shock, wobbling a bit in Mingyu’s hold.  Minghao supposed that out of all of them, Joshua had been the one to go through the most emotional trauma that day.

(Not to say that Minghao felt at all bad about yelling at Josh.  He didn’t, because he’d deserved it.  But he supposed, given everything else that had happened in the past couple of hours, he would refrain from yelling any more for the time being.)

“Let’s do it tomorrow.”  The words came out more decisively than Minghao had intended, but perhaps that was for the best.  “We’ll go talk to Seungkwan and figure out what time we can meet Vernon, then let you guys know.  It’s high time we finish this whole thing.”    

* * *

 

Seungkwan was more than a little skeptical of their request. 

“Vernon?” he echoed, raising both eyebrows high enough that they practically disappeared beneath his fluffy blonde hair.  “What in the goddess’s name do you want to talk to Vernon for?”

Minghao exchanged a glance with Junhui, who just shrugged in response.  _So helpful_.  “It’s, um… complicated,” he said.  “It has to do with some of the stuff that’s been happening to me lately.”

“Do you know anything about him?” Junhui put in hopefully.  “Has he said anything?”

Seungkwan pursed his lips in response, hands deftly shuffling his tarot cards.  They’d managed to catch the teenager in between clients, so now the three of them were situated in the reading room, Chan silently working on a new Lego construction in the opposite corner.  “I don’t know much, but probably more than anyone else in our class,” he said finally.  “Everyone else thinks he’s weird because he almost never talks and is always wearing that dumb hoodie, but I live with _you_ all, so weird is relative.”

“Did he say where he’s from, or anything about his family?”

“No.”  The cards stopped abruptly as Seungkwan frowned.  “His energy is…weird, to be honest.  I can’t see much around him, but I knew I shouldn’t ask about that.  The answer wouldn’t have been good.  He just said he was homeschooled, before.”

Junhui made a sudden, startled sound next to him, then immediately started chewing on his thumbnail.  Minghao immediately recognized that the other must have realized something important, but didn’t want to say it in front of Seungkwan.  He didn't know how he felt about the fact that he apparently knew Junhui well enough to immediately recognize that.

“Anyways, can we talk to him?” he repeated, if only to get Seungkwan to stop staring at Junhui suspiciously.  “Tomorrow?”

Seungkwan turned his attention back towards Minghao, tapping a finger against his chin.  “I suppose so,” he said finally.  “We have English together for fourth period, and after that is lunch.  He normally eats in the library, but I suppose I could convince him to talk to my weirdo roommate and his friends instead.”

“Cool.  We’ll get there after fourth period then, if you can meet us in front of the school.” 

“Be careful,” a new, high-pitched voice intoned.  Glancing over his shoulder, Minghao saw that Chan hadn’t looked up, still carefully snapping Legos into place in what looked like…

The kick Junhui gave to his shin was really unnecessary, Minghao had spent just as much time looking at MothCam as the other had.  He was able to recognize the living room of 1034 when he saw it. 

“What’cha building there?” he asked, hoping that his voice was casual enough not to incite suspicion from either of the two psychics in the room.

Luckily, it looked as though Seungkwan was no longer paying attention, and Chan just shrugged in response.  “Dunno.  House, I guess.” 

There was something about the Lego house that was bothering him – it looked completely correct, with the couch and coffee table and television all in the correct locations – but there was something off, and Minghao just couldn’t put his finger on it.

Probably nothing.

“Okay, well.  Thanks, Kwan.  We’ll see you tomorrow.” 

“Mhmm.”  Seungkwan waved them out, and Minghao kept quiet as he led Junhui out of the reading room and down the hall, not saying a word until the two of them had stepped out of the house.  Only then, when the front door had shut behind him and they were on the porch, Minghao turned to face the other boy. 

“What is it?”

Junhui was chewing on his thumbnail again, gaze slightly unfocused, but he blinked and his eyes flickered towards Minghao’s face.  “What’s what?”

“You realized something, while we were talking to Kwan.”  Self-consciousness suddenly making itself known at his own certainty, Minghao coughed slightly and reached up to run a hand through his hair, tugging a bit at the ends.  “I mean, I thought you did, maybe I was-”

“No,” Junhui interrupted, looking slightly surprised but also with the tiniest of smiles curling his lips.  “No, you’re right.  I did realize something.”

“So what is it?”  Minghao wasn’t sure he liked that smile – it was making him feel all kinds of antsy.

“Oh.”  Junhui shrugged.  “It wasn’t anything major.  I just realized that none of your housemates can see Manifested objects.  The hell-beasts, Soonyoung… and then Seungkwan just said that Vernon’s energy is weird, which is the same thing they said about you when you started getting attacked.  It probably has something to do with them being displaced from their original timescape.”

_Holy shit_.  He never would have made that connection on his own, and Minghao could feel the surprise on his face.  “You really remembered them saying that?”

Now Junhui looked embarrassed as he shrugged again.  “It’s part of being into literature, I guess.  Gotta keep track of motifs.” 

“Nerd,” Minghao said automatically, eyes flicking down as he suddenly realized just how close they were standing to each other, face-to-face on his front porch.  There was barely a foot of wooden decking between their feet, and he kept his eyes on that space as he added, “You keep trying to turn this into a story.”

He heard Junhui laugh softly, and saw his feet shuffle one, two inches forward, shrinking the space just a bit more.  “Everything’s a story, Hao.  You just gotta know where to look.”

Lifting his head, Minghao tore his eyes from the deck beneath their feet and instead found Junhui staring directly at him, still wearing that soft, almost secret smile.  “Where are we right now then, in the story?” he asked.  “What’s going to happen?”

The smile widened a bit as Junhui chuckled again, but this time there was something humorless in it.  “We’re right at the climax, Hao,” Jun said, and he sounded so certain that Minghao believed him intrinsically.  “Tomorrow’s the big day, there’s no doubt about that.  As for what’s going to happen, I have no idea, but…”

Quickly, so quickly that for a moment Minghao thought he’d imagined it, he felt the lightest of pressures against his cheek, and it took him a second to realize that it was the back of Junhui’s fingers, grazing delicately over his skin and leaving a trail of fire in their wake.

“I’m hoping for a happy ending.”

And then he was gone, quickly bounding down the porch steps and onto his motorcycle with a loud “See you tomorrow, HaoHao!”  The helmet was shoved onto his head quickly, but not quick enough for Minghao to miss that Junhui’s face was bright red, and also that he was grinning like an absolute _loser_.

Choking out a “ _see you_ ,” Minghao felt his feet unroot from the porch as he stumbled inside, quickly shutting the door and leaning back against it.

_Holy shit_ , he thought hazily, one hand coming up and touching his cheek, the skin burning hot beneath his fingertips.  _I think Wen Junhui likes me_.

From all the way upstairs, he heard Seokmin yell, “NO _SHIT_ , SHERLOCK!”

* * *

 

(It was only as he was about to fall asleep that Minghao realized what had been bothering him about Chan’s Lego building.

(There hadn’t been two people in the house.  There had been seven.)

* * *

 

The four of them were in Mingyu’s minivan when it all went wrong.

They were on their way to the local highschool – Mingyu driving, Joshua and Junhui in the backseat, Minghao in the passenger’s seat very determinedly not looking at Junhui in the rearview mirror, because he was fairly certain that his face would turn bright red if he did.  They were about ten minutes away from the school when Minghao’s phone rang.  Frowning, he checked the caller ID, then immediately picked up.

“Kwan?”

“ _Vernon’s in trouble_.”

His phone volume was up loud enough that even though Seungkwan was whispering Minghao knew the others could hear it, if the suddenly panicked look Mingyu shot him and the strangled noise coming from Joshua’s seat was any indication.  “What do you mean?”

“ _I_ mean _, he’s not in class, he’s not in school, and he’s in trouble.  You need to go to him right now._ ”

Breaking his own rule, Minghao looked up at the rearview mirror to catch the others’ eyes, seeing his own confusion and sudden terror reflected back at him.  “We were kind of trying to avoid going to his house, actually-”

“ _Listen, I don’t know what you all are up to, but I know that something very bad is happening right now, so I faked a vomiting fit to get out of class and am hiding in a supply closet to tell you that you need to go there this instant.  It’ll be fine, I think – get your friend to tear the space and get you there right now.  There’s no time to waste._ ”

“Tear the space?” Minghao echoed, but the only response he got was the beeping of his phone to signal that Seungkwan had hung up. 

“Now what?”  Mingyu’s voice was high-pitched with panic, knuckles turning white on the steering wheel.  “Do I turn around?  Do we go to 1034?”

“He said we don’t have time.”  Minghao twisted around in his seat to face Joshua, even as he felt Mingyu pulling a U-turn anyways.  “What did he mean, ‘tear the space’?”

If Mingyu seemed panicked, Joshua looked absolutely terror-stricken.  “I-  There’s a Manifest technique that I’ve heard is possible, but I’ve never tried it before.  It’s just manipulating space like usual, but instead of pulling something through you just…go from one place to another.”

“A wrinkle in time,” Junhui put in.

“Do it,” Minghao said.

“What?!”  Joshua shook his head, hands clutching at the seat beneath him.  “I can’t, I just told you I’ve never tried before!”

“Josh.”  It was Junhui who said it, voice soft and assuring as he placed a hand on the other’s shoulder.  “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

Minghao nodded.  “You can do it, Josh.  Vernon’s counting on you.”

“Just tell me what to do,” Mingyu said. 

He saw Joshua close his eyes for a moment, breathing in deeply, before exhaling and opening his eyes. 

They were glowing bright white. 

“Stop the car,” he said, hands unbuckling his seatbelt in a robot-like fashion. 

Within seconds, Mingyu had pulled them into a parking lot off the side of the road. 

“Get out.”

They obeyed without question, and Joshua stepped in front of them, hands raising. 

“I don’t know how long I can keep it going for,” he said.  “So once I get it open, we have to be quick.” 

No sooner were the words out of his mouth that the air in front of them was ripped apart, a jagged line opening in space and parting its lips to reveal an inky, swirling darkness, like a giant mouth waiting to swallow them whole.

“In, now!”

Minghao paused for half a second, staring into the wailing, swirling void in front of them.  He felt someone take his hand, and knew it was Junhui without even looking.

“Let’s go,” he said, and the four of them jumped.

* * *

 

When he tried to think back on it later, Minghao could not even begin to attempt to conjure up the words for what it felt to fall through the Universe. 

It was being everywhere and nowhere, all at once.  It was tumbling over and over and over, and having no way of knowing just how long it had been.  It was feeling nothing around him except for the one point of contact that was Junhui’s palm in his, it was thinking that he could hear Mingyu’s surprised yell but it was more in his head than in the void around him, and it was feeling Joshua’s voice whispering _please please please please please…_

And then it was over, and the four of them were tumbling over one another and landing with loud _thumps_ on the pristine white carpet of 1034 Somnium Drive.

They arrived just in time to see Celestino’s arm swing forward, to see the tumbler leaving his hand, and to see the glass shatter against Vernon’s face.

**Author's Note:**

> me reading my own work: wow my dude you sure do love those italics don't you?
> 
> Please leave kudos and comments so that I am encouraged to write more, or check out [my kpop tumblr](http://yoongifox.tumblr.com/) to talk to me or just witness my progressive daily mental breakdowns.


End file.
